Becoming a monster

I believe I wrote a crappy poem about this, so I’ll write it again in prose.

Have you ever feared change? The political climate now is all for change, and I can see why: we have things we hate about the current system and we want to fix these things. We know what we want and we most certainly don’t want the status quo any more.

However, the change I’m talking about is one closer to home. It is a change that comes from within ourselves yet we move blindly toward. It is a change wherein we attempt to abandon everything we once knew to become something that someone else claims is ultimately better.

Why do we do it? Faith. Or maybe because it’s what everyone else is doing. Or maybe it’s what we intuitively feel should be true.

But why should we feel that some shadowy person is who we should be? We’ve lived so long in our lowly states…certainly, can’t we polish ourselves without rejecting ourselves first?

I read this anonymous lamentation of someone who underwent what she believed to be a beneficial change but which she realized made her the monster she always hated…I’m not entirely sure if Group Hug confessions are fair game, but I’ll go ahead and try, since this is the most popular confession as of now:

I used to be a complete ‘freak’ – I wore all black and bondage pants and was into really heavy metal and science fiction and all that stuff. I always said I hated the jocks and cheerleaders, but secretly all I ever wanted was to be like them, and liked by them.

Then, last May, my parents told me we were moving, and I suddenly realised that now was my chance to change. I was moving to a state on the other side of the country, so no one would ever know what I used to be like. Now I could be whoever I wanted.So I got a summer job, started working out, dyed my hair lighter and wore lighter make-up. I earned enough money to get pretty much a whole new wardrobe, and I lost a load of weight. When I started school again, I hung out at the football games and got to know the cheerleaders and the football players, and started hanging around with them. A few months later, and now I’m friends with all the popular girls, and I’m dating a football player.

My confession? I hate my new life. I was much happier as a freak, but I don’t have the guts to drop all my new ‘friends’ (who, by the way, are all shallow idiots) and go back to the way I was. Besides, even if I did have the guts, the people at my school that are like my old crowd all despise me, because they think I’m just like every other jock and cheerleader.

The scariest thing is that maybe I am.

Now, I guess I’m not a “freak” who fears the jocks and cheerleaders or despises them or anything like that…but after scrubbing this account down, the labels wither away to reveal a universal model. We seem to have notorious intuitions when it comes to what is best for us…and that can lead to us inadvertently becoming the monsters we’ve always hated. We might think being more social will be well with us, or becoming more religious (or even becoming less religious); becoming more sexually free (or learning to control ourselves), but we don’t really know anything.For me, I don’t think there’s a particular monster…mine is much more generic. If I ever woke up one day and couldn’t understand who I was yesterday, I’d be a monster. If I ever woke up one day and began to join the masses in denouncing who I once was, I’d be a monster. Who am I if I can’t read my journal — my autobiography — and know who I am, who I was, how I felt, or how I now feel?

This keeps me back. I know I have the potential to go in so many directions and enter so many doors, yet I don’t. I know I’ve refused some doors in my past for my ideology. Maybe I should feel ashamed; maybe I should realize I’m naive, yet I don’t. I won’t leap in any direction for fear of losing myself. If it’s naive; if it’s shameful, it’s something I can own as something uniquely naive to me.