Wear A Purple Hat

     Somewhere deep within, somewhere quietly brooding inside of my psyche, there is a malnourished, socially unkempt, and psychologically naive hunchback of a person clawing at the walls of my brain to be released from the confines of his tiny cell. He emerges occasionally, just to make his presence known, just enough to give his host that odd quirk, that almost normal edge that fools people most of the time. And I beat him back, trying my best to decommission the bastard, but he always recovers and comes on again, just as strong as before, just as nimble and adept at the attempt to fortify his position as the premier personality as he always is.

     At first glance, I fit in. At first glance, I am a social giant, an agent of normal society, outgoing with charm and personality to boot. In a snapshot, I can make the whole seem like a masterpiece, the music heavenly and inspiring--all of that. But I get inside my own mind. My uncontrollable urge to inwardly reflect damages my ability to prove that the whole suite IS a masterpiece. Instead I'm forced to demonstrate the simple etudes and sell people on the fact that the rest is of equal quality. I'm a pretty good salesman. Despite my ability to sell the full suite sight unseen, there are times when a piece of the drivel goes public, leaked beyond my ability to curtail its release. This small fact has made me a master of cleanup, able to reign the crazy back in, and present a beautiful snapshot of sonata in behind it almost immediately. So fast in fact, that people often wonder if that glimpse of mush ever really happened at all. It has become an arrangement I can at least comfortably handle.

     I often wonder if other people have this inward process of thought. If others, too, are suppressing bouts of second guessing, lack of confidence, and unhealthy self examination. Maybe it's human nature. Who can really say they are openly honest 100% of the time? I believe that most people are not. Not are they not honest with others, they probably are not even honest with themselves. But the reality of it is that I really don't know if this is the case at all, and so I can only judge it from my own instincts, my own inward mental activity and strive to at least be honest with myself, which is a hard pill to swallow. That pill is proverbial, for your reference, in case you thought I might ingest a foreign hormonal crutch into the already unbalanced mix. In digression, I think that personal honesty is important to one's development as a human being. It is a facet to life that humanity pays too little attention to. This process of internal awareness and personal growth can be practiced without anyone else's knowledge of it. It's strictly a mental exercise. It takes time to become honest with yourself, to examine how you truly feel about something and why. It's so easy, as busy as we make ourselves to accept the surface feeling of something and then move on, without much more thought about it.

     Language is a barrier to feelings. If we can not articulate how something makes us feel, how can we really even justify those feelings to ourselves? It's difficult, and often, the feeling of difficulty is so great, we don't even try. It takes too much time. Anything worth doing is difficult. I've heard that somewhere before. It makes sense, I guess. So, I suppose what I'm really wondering is do I fit in? Can I fit in? People ask this question of themselves. Normal. Am I normal? And I wonder, then, what defines normal? Normal is what most people are doing. If the population of the world wears purple hats, and I don't, I'm not normal. It is a little distressing how willing I am to make sure that I fall in line, that I too purchase a purple hat so that I'm not outcast, exiled from the right of humanity. We are defined by our individuality as people, and what we, personally, have to offer that others cannot. Yet, we don't want to be TOO individualistic, TOO off the grid and unable to reconcile what the masses consider to be normal.

     So, I'm saying that my desire to be normal is a forced action, a fraudulent move so that others can feel comfortable interacting with me. My inner hunchback, that abnormal creature clawing to get out is my individualism, my need to be different, expressive, and creative. But everything in me tells me to keep him chained up, locked away because people just won't understand it. Not in this world, where purple hats are the going trend.

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