Life Isn't a performance so why make it a play?
This play has a soundtrack, don’t be boring and 🎧 listen here🎧
Call your friends and I’ll call mine. The feeling of your friends laughter over the music playing, a hug and a cry so closely intertwined. In recent days you look to absorb as much as you can with the time you’ve been allowed. Limited time. It seems as though the more you attempt to do the more you long for the simple pleasures life has to offer. A sunset by the beach, a visit to the anecnotta. Sipping orange wine, eating cake with your hands because there were no forks, laughing as you feed it to others while sitting on chairs too small to fit two people but you manage to do it anyway. The warm air reminding you of the life that’s held within us. What a privilege it is to feel so much. Sometimes I stop and think that for all the sadness in the world there is an insurmountable amount of beauty in the world. At times so much that it engulfs me, and fills me with red till I burst. Then once again I am emancipated. With as complicated as we make our lives it could all be so simple. Life doesn’t have to be this poor attempt of charades and virtue signaling. Life isn’t a performance so who are you really when there is no one else around. How personal is your purpose or better yet, how personal can you make it.
When you realize life comes from you and not at you, you can start to live. What does it mean to live? What does it mean to you? With those you hold closest to you, do you let yourself be seen? Like really really seen, or do you keep yourself hidden as a poor attempt to shield you from the thing most foreign to you; authenticity. In a growth phase of your own, the experiences you’re meant to grow from now working in your favor. It’s funny the silence works well to hold the conversations you never had but in the end it all feels right. There are no promises but with no promises do you attempt to write your own? It was supposed to be your story so why are you left standing on a stage? In a time where ACTUALLY reading a book in public is cringed upon the people who talk about culture to assert identity or status now a poor attempt of virtue signaling through performative intellect. Everything is performative to you because nothing you do is truly authentic to you. These moments so significant, our discomfort with this is not because it actually shapes their inner life but rather what it screams to the general audience. Its culture as a class performance… a way of seeming emotionally deep, superior rather than something that actually helps them to understand life. It’s how many plus points you get for knowing a piece of information you’ve regurgitated a million times before, yet your inability to read the room says otherwise. To those culturally sentimental it reeks of performance. Knowledge is power but in an age of performance in the 2D, is it really if you announce it everywhere all the time?
Who are you when theres no one else around? Sometimes it isnt searching but remembering who it is you were before the noise of life got in the way. Unfog the glass that’s become occluded with everything outside of yourself. You strip identity down to your thoughts, your morals, beliefs. Who do you see? Do you recognize them? The performer unable to recognize themselves in the front row of the audience. How did it get this way? The loss of the self. One of the four in plato’s divine madnesses. The burden of the self. Why does the loss of the self torment us? An inescapable reminder that we are living and breathing. The omnipresent reminder of our own mortality, individual souls that are too afraid to surrender and yet here we are grasping at straws, more miserable than any other thing. Like getting caught in a rip current you try and fight only to find you’ve tired yourself out. But the show must go on. Because who will buy tickets to the show if the magic of production is gone. There is no integrity to anything anymore. In an age of absolute obsolescence the most powerful thing you can do is hold onto the self. Sit there as you may but release the burdens that bog you down. Your desperate attempt to please and lose sight of who you are has caused you immense pain. But isn’t pain what makes us most self aware? Come back to who you were before they threw you onto the stage. Strange as you are, beautiful as you come and curious as you go. The magic of being the viewer, you see those enjoying the show and see past the tired performer. The beautiful juxtaposition of the sad ways life conditions you to interpret the human experience. It only takes finding yourself, to feel and allow yourself to be.
Freedom in its truest form is an act of bravery. Unsure of the way you are, the fatal flaw of the human experience is to be picturesque at all times, yet the condition of the human experience is to give and let others give. Take and let yourself be had. For life is too short to deny others of the magic you have to offer. Let others experience you. Explore every emotion further. Kiss passionately and cry like you meant it. It’s getting warmer out and it all feels right. The bark of a dog, the hum of the music occluded by the sound of crashing waves. To be and to sit in this space with yourself is to be free. Liminal in its purest form a place to rest your thoughts, thinking of the old times; soon you too will know the feeling of when It all feels right. At its worst the sceneries to nothingness can actually be everything. Left alone with nothing while others talk, all this time buying into something you already have.
-Z
