What stops you from being you?

Go ahead and spin thoughts around the concept of “you” as you — the imaginary person inside the body that is you, and not a set of states of energy that creates the concept of “you” in order to best perpetuate the set’s successful habit of perpetuating itself.

How many of you feel bullied by the subculture(s) in which you spend the majority of your waking hours?

Recently, local news organisations have focused on the detrimental effect of bullying on a minority of students who feel unempowered to assert their egos above the noise of activity that interferes with the alleged goal of primary/secondary education to create well-rounded, socially-productive adults.

What is bullying?

Wasn’t my complicit act with teachers to walk around bragging about being intellectually superiour to most of my fellow students a form of bullying to those who felt intimidated by intellectual snobbery?

It wasn’t just the guys and gals who had no creative outlets for their inferiority complexes and resorted to physical intimidation we could call bullies.

Or maybe that’s all it is:

Competition against our worst fears of being less than something we would be if we could be left alone to be ourselves without interference from those who are competing against their worst fears and acting out aggressively against us.

The thousands of people I met while surviving the ordeal of public education taught me at least one thing per person (other than name or body type) — their concepts of self in relation to society.

In other words, none of us are normal, unless you want to stick to the definition of normal as the least common denominator that smooths out the highs and lows of individual personalities, creating an average goo to which none of us wholly sticks.

A sticky issue, is it not?

Where is the hard line that separates bullying from people expressing their personalities by competing against their peers?

What is the difference between a slave and an indentured servant?

What is the difference between an indentured servant and a person who signs a contract to pay a significant portion of salary for 30 years on a home mortgage, plus one or more automobile loans, credit card debt, etc.? [Easy answer: bankruptcy proceedings]

Where does freedom start and when does freedom end?

We would all be labeled eccentric if we were the selves we think we are in contrast to the compromises we often make in daily life to be understood.

“Why can’t everyone just speak my language?”

“Why do I have to talk in simple ‘layman’s terms’ to be understood?”

“Why do I have to repeat myself?  It’s obvious what I just said!”

Yeah, the guy driving by in his truck, towing his fishing boat, has an image of a jig that’s different from the Irish singer and completely incomprehensible to a person without training in assigning concepts to symbols we associate with the “English language,” itself an amalgam of cultural symbol sets.

Only you can prevent bullying, by not empowering the fears/insecurities of the person who wants to intimidate you through feeding on your fears/insecurities.  To paraphrase:

Starve the bully, feed your strengths.

I don’t know how many times a guy wanted to physically intimidate me because I represented the strengths of educational prowess he was denied in classrooms by teachers who rewarded intelligence, parents who hadn’t instilled good study habits, test-taking handicaps not addressed by peers/adults and the myriad ways that a person who doesn’t conform to a systematic approach to generalised education of individuals is inadvertently punished.

I learned to tell that guy if he wants to feel more powerful than me, then feel it.  No need to get into a physical brawl just to show he was still acting dumber than me by getting into trouble with school authorities.  Believe in his strengths and don’t listen to people who prey on his weaknesses to make themselves feel better.

The school age version of how to win friends and influence people.

For example, imagine being an atheist Boy Scout in a troop sponsored by a church that brags its method of social conformity is the only way, with the largest number of missionaries in the world — one may assert one’s lack of need to depend on an invisible omnipotent/omniscient being that controls one’s life and get ostracised by both the church and Boy Scout organisation, a form of bullying that is socially acceptable in many subcultures around the world; or one may focus on the important tasks at hand — tying knots, practicing first aid techniques, picking up trash on the side of the road, acquiring leadership skills, assisting during ecological disasters, and learning to recognise 100 bird species — don’t feed the bully hidden in the social construct.

Water on a duck’s back.

Sometimes, simply follow the path of least resistance in a situation when you want to get what you want, knowing you won’t convert anyone to your way of thinking, rather than reinforce a subculture’s resistance to your ideas and prevent either one of you from making progress.

Be the example of yourself to yourself first.

If others want to follow, they will.  No need to bully them into submission.

Intellectual superiourity is a myth propagated by those who miss the point we’re the best we can be in the moment, intellectual superiourity merely a comparison to moments that no longer exist.

Only you can be you, no matter how uninhibited you may appear to others.

Enough self-motivational chitchat for the day.

Time to enjoy the sunshine and later return to words/images/sounds spread across the Internet where we express our individuality in ways that are easily misunderstood by someone who has developed the habit of bad-mouthing us through years of exposure to bullying behaviour, instead of self actualisation skills.

Life!  It’s free!  You get what you pay for!