I never really liked parties. There's always too much noise and too many bodies in the room for anyone to be comfortable. The smell of the heat and sweat accompanied with the blaring noises of music and people trying desperately to feel accepted. And there are always those people. You know them, the ones who come in with the expectation that this will be the greatest night of their young lives. They strut into the party wearing their best clothes and too much perfume with their noses upturned to the world, expectations too high for anyone to achieve so the night always ends the same way. They end up running through the room with tears running down their face while running through their mind is the same mantra that is the backdrop of their lives. "Why me?"
Why indeed?
You set yourself up for being let down. The perfect night you had so perfectly planned has wild cards. People will never behave the way you expect because people will never see the importance that is you. Those people, who keep their heads down in a rut of familiarity reaching up in an effort to be different. They grasp at clouds of change and believe they have risen out of the rut and begin to think they are different. Discreet feelings they may not notice, that they hold more significance than others, may not be acknowledged but is shown in the expressions on their faces and the way they cast their eyes down at others. Then reality strikes like a lightning bolt and they realize they are crawling in that same rut everyone else knew they were, and the clouds they grasped were just hopes and dreams slipping through their fingers leaving them with nothing but the despair that they were never really different at all.
Was it their fault? Or could it be that, despite what they let everyone believe, they felt the judgment of others? The comments said behind their back mixed with the disbelief and lack of support for what is different because different is bad. Yet we all strive for individuality, don't we? We are a walking contradiction. Believing that we can be different yet striving to fit in anywhere we can because it is an almost primal desire to be accepted. Accepted how we truly are. But how do we even know who we are? Our only constant is that we are constantly changing. We try to develop ourselves into who others expect with pictures of ourselves that are strangers to the truth. We mold the clay of our minds into superficial sculptures of what we believe society wants, for the reward of a fleeting moment of acceptance among the hours of insecurity and loneliness.
So we change. We become like everyone else. And like everyone else, we want to become different. A never ending dance that no one recognizes but all dance to the same tune. Like a party. But maybe that's not you. Maybe you are content with who you are and feel none of the loneliness. After all, the most convincing lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
