The reward of conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself

Have you noticed we can be disciplined to all standards but our own?

There is an invisible tax I watch everyone I love pay, and every time I hear the ch-ching of the transaction, I want to crawl out of my skin.

Have you ever seen someone you adore act a little less strange, say something a little less opinionated, become a touch more controlled?

It’s a pathological degree of self-editing, guided by the siren birds that whisper songs of conformity in our ears. Where did they come from? When will they go? Surely, it must be time to migrate soon, but are they ever replaced? Are we doomed to listen to these phantoms forevermore? Of who we should be, how we should look, what we should think, if only we knew the right chords?

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
rita may brown

You become an ideal, a standard, a person stripped of enough specificity that no one can find a reason to object. Because if you had any deep or resounding personality traits, eventually you’d stumble upon people who just don’t like you. But that’s uncomfortable, and so we avoid.

We forget that there is no self-respect to be found in getting everyone’s approval. The same way that the only’ ‘normal’ person you know is the one you’ve never met. As soon as you meet this so-called normal person, you’d discover the things that make them human: the strange preference, the unsettling opinion, the odd detail you remember them by. Normality is a mirage, it only survives at a distance.

artwork by dread.jpg

It’s like an even more fucked-up Oz, because at least the Wizard of Oz knows he’s a fraud. He stands behind the curtain manufacturing an illusion, fully aware that the authority everyone fears is artificial. But the people I see don’t know there is a curtain. They have no idea that the thing they are obeying is harming them, fracturing the literal edges of their psyche. Because each time you conform, each time you play it safe, there will simply be someone else whose approval you want.

Illustration by the contemporary American multimedia artist and poet Arch Budzar.

---

We all know the sound of that familiar voice that scolds us when we have gone astray. The voice that arrives when you realize you should’ve just worn it, should’ve just said it, should’ve just trusted the impulse before you strangled it, because standing in front of you is living proof that someone else did.

Understand: if you only realize it then, you are not realizing it at all.

If the only time you wish you had stood your ground is when you discover that someone else already has, that’s not courage. It’s self-loathing. It’s the sick, sour pit that feeds your biggest insecurity: You have negotiated against yourself, and lost.

How many times will you water yourself down before it starts to sting your lungs?

How many outfits have you changed at the last minute? How many messages have you left unsent? How much longer are we supposed to chip away at ourselves, trying to produce this perfect statue?

We can study a room, anticipate its appetite, correct ourselves before anyone else has the chance, and have the nerve to call that maturity. We can obey the imagined preferences of complete strangers with extraordinary precision. But the moment we attempt to become disciplined in service of ourselves, of our own taste, our own convictions, our own strange and private standards, we begin to worry that maybe we’ve gone too far.

It’s a farce, a game. A magic manipulation of the highest order, convincing us that if we file down one more edge, silence one more impulse, become one degree more palatable, we will finally arrive at the version of ourselves no one can reject.

Have you noticed we can be disciplined to all standards but our own?

The salt of life is the necessary chaos of difference. Not the cheap performance of defiance, but the friction through which we sharpen our own inner discipline. The self is not strengthened by being universally received. The self is strengthened by what it refuses to abandon.

Kill the bird that sings in your ear.
You know he was off-tune, anyway.

With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List