On being strange
One strategy which I employ in life is to be very strange.
Or rather, not try to be not strange: trying to be normal and to fit in has taken me nowhere.
When I was a young man, before I was a handsome one, I tried my very best to fit in because I had a yearning to be loved. I went to great lengths to please my classmates to try to gain their acceptance and to make friends of them, and I paid a high price with my dignity and so forth, but it gained me less than nothing.
Such a state of being as I was then is sort of a shapeless state of failure. (Someone who to this day seem to me to be a cringe inducing nightmare.)
Then one day enough was enough: I concluded that they (my “peers”) were never going to accept me (I was a joke) and I couldn’t successfully be normal: That that was an unachievable goal to me.
By that time I had long since let go of my oars and was just aimlessly drifting ever which way because I had no goal or anything: it was enough of a struggle to keep afloat.
Anyhow so I gave up on being normal and decided to become instead very strange: invent my own clothing style with Hawaii shirts and t-shirts with hearts printed on them and sunglasses and whatever ugly shit I could find, and when people would point out I was looking like a fag I would show them that I also had on nail polish.
That strangeness made them lose their leverage on me, because no longer did I care to please them: The contempt they had for me I felt it now against them in equal measure.
So that’s how I was able to grab once again the oars of my metaphorical boat and to start rowing. It wasn’t no easy journey, but with the years I became handsomer and handsomer, and I found some friends who didn’t care if I was strange or not: even they liked it.
Like that song with Shakira and Dizzee Rascal: “I’m crazy but you like it, loca, loca, loca”.
In fact no hurdle has come my way since then which has created an equally big existential crisis and also I have been happy (more or less) ever since.
Cause I came out a Diamond.