I have a friend named Lars who’s handwriting is immaculate. Lars is a large and masculine man but finely acute to detail and poised truthfully, instead of postured aggressively. It is out of the gender norm for men to have nice handwriting. He was mildly heckled and teased for having such “nice” penmanship growing up. One of the reasons Lars did not give into this is that his family is Norwegian, a very proud and respectable family. He had pride in himself and his heritage through his parents and himself. Being from a different culture he was given different standards at his home. The more elementary and basic of assumptions and values differs strongly and is reinforced differently. Most outside his circle of know would not arrive past his neglecting of social standards. Lars himself did not note at all the notoriety of his change in standard to the norms but his abstract of the normal stereotypes gave and reinforced a greater freedom for Lars to not only have “pretty” aesthetic to his wordsmith-ery but also to take pride in it.
My friend who we will call Miss Z is an incredibly proud woman whom I believe is blinded by her ego and confidence. She comes from an incredibly family that stands up for what it believes in and gets a move forward for what they believe in. Their productivity is inarguable but their accuracy and attention to detail is highly u to question as they propel so strongly and fervently forward that they miss out on many details and derailing qualities which may be more immediately important than the giant issues they claim to be fighting for. Now, I don’t believe it is within Miss Z to be outside this sort of momentum. Her family is Jewish, extremely well connected politically, and very wealthy. This sort of stereotype is hard to escape for multiple reasons outside of home pressure. Once a powerful statement is made,even if that statement is as as persona, it takes quite a bit of flack to go back on such statement. Embarrassment is also a factor that her upbringing does not deal well with. I venture with the statement that she would find it incredibly difficult to go back on a spoken ideal once said for more reason of homebred pride and stereotypical persona definition far more so than her personal issue or values.
We are inscribed to our own state by the lines drawn upon us in our nurturing. Our nature is not overridden by it but the setting and social gravity that works at a constant presses upon us to be something we may decide against or indulge upon but never are able to simply step waywards from such without leaving much behind. It can’t be sidestepped but excessively and extravagantly eluded. For instance a daughter we drops out of college, dyes her hair, takes up sex work and become a nun. She has very little to stand up for and no prototype that actually fits her. The people who tattoo their whole faces and alter their physical appearance. A new persona must be created for normal society does not have a working concept hold “weird” and that is just the mind clashing with its own walls for lack of definition. Even these folks face expectations and are pressed. Is there really a way to escape the wards and pressures of our own existence? We need a feel of belonging and acknowledgement from fellow humans to find sanity, its quite high on human needs.
Scariest bite of this snake is not the burn of the venom or the puncture of the skin but how silently it creeps and directs our lives. We are not exempt from this sort of social pressure unless we are at constant war with societal reason and expectation, both of which are nearly arbitrary in whole. Perhaps a new definition and explanation to those we deem worthy to suffice our human need for empathy and belonging with can be those. The rest we can fake as we know in our hearts that we do belong in this world.
