How much is this really you?

I say I haven’t listened to enough music. But when your mind starts thinking in lyrics spanning across various genres, it might be a sign that you’re wrong. I suppose the reasoning I have for thinking this way is because I can’t quite list out enough yet. Yes, I actually expect to grow into a walking encyclopedia for my interests, or at least the ones I spend hours thinking about. I must be crazy enough to mistake myself for a tree in the process of being harvested for paper, with the potential of being used for any purpose of education or entertainment. Maybe I haven’t researched enough, maybe this is a mission impossible where I’m stuck chasing a target throughout the years. I’m not quite sure, but it’s likely that I could get closer to this by putting far less emphasis on the “impossible” part. Perhaps that is what’s holding me back. 

I think about television. I think about it more often now, as I spend more time trying to immerse myself in other worlds. That, recently, being TV shows. A pattern I often notice is where some main characters are made to be “highly intelligent” in a very textbook, stereotypical, (statistically) unrealistic manner, or however you’d like to put it. It’s definitely used to help define personality, which is somewhat true in real life as well, so there’s not always something too wrong with that. I would say I think it’s a shame that more “average” people aren’t represented or focused on in certain stories, but then again, what does that even mean? And aren’t there already an infinite amount of stories being written about everything that could possibly be imagined? I think I’m really not qualified to say much on this because I may very well be inventing a problem that mainly just plagues beginner writers (this is a common trope).. And afterall, how many people really want to think about a reality closer to their own?

I say that I want to be able to quote other people’s words. It’s not because I don’t have my own, or just because there is more credibility behind certain people, but it’s a way to form connections and be.. Interesting? By that, I mean referencing something someone else is more familiar with compared to myself is not just useful in debate, law, prayer, etc, but in luring people into wanting to talk to you (when you show a glimpse of personality)! But we are not all characters, to that extent. I’m not even sure if it’s good to strive to be, as you can stray even further away from yourself. It’s said that social media makes it easier for people to carry out performances where they present themselves the way they want to be seen by others, which again, is okay to some extent. We’ve never been expected to always say exactly what we’re thinking as it can cause problems, though it must get exhausting.

I think about how we’re often told to live certain ways, strive for certain things. Maybe the connection I’m trying to make won’t make sense right away, just stick with me: What always stuck out to me about Sherlock Holmes, for instance, was the fact he never bothered with trying to remember basic concepts in, say, astronomy, simply because it didn’t interest him! Imagine if we lived our lives only paying attention to what we thought was relevant to ourselves. I wonder, could we even survive in a society with such “selfishness” and impulsivity? There are benefits in forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to, but I will just sum it up by saying life isn’t about being completely happy in distancing ourselves from experiencing any negative experience every time (key words: any, every). I support getting away from reality, but not to where you never see what’s in front of you again.

What I’m really trying to say is, there is really no single “right way” to live. Regardless of what anyone tells you, a person with a healthy mind just tries to live by doing what they think is okay, but no one really knows. We’re all just trying something, even if it seems closer to doing nothing at all. I say I want to be able to quote others, because that is the closest I can get to learning what a person means. I don’t know the science behind much of what we’re expected to know, because I’ve never understood how to care about calculations. As in, one thing I know is I am always interacting with math with everything I physically touch, so I should be able to dissociate from what objects are supposed to mean to us now, and just see them as shapes. I can sort of forget the associations, and do just that (view the world as something alien or in/from another dimension), yet I still do not care. Why? Because like non-human animals, and in the verbal sense, infants, it does not respond back with either language I’m stubbornly fixated on: Facial expressions and/or words.

So here I am, mentally striving to become more of a person.. beyond what anyone unrelated to me would first see. A stranger can judge you on your appearance, a loved one can try to describe you, a dog can recognize you by your scent, how much is this “really” you?