There are easy answers to most things in life, and then there are difficult answers, and god forbid I make the easy choice.
Occasionally, I am overwhelmed by my stubbornness, my sticky individuality, and my firm sense of self. I have a habit of making life more difficult for myself. For all its benefits in the individual’s search for truth and goodness, the social maverick lives mostly in public isolation, in crowds but never of them. We do not choose a life of non-conformism, our fate in our hands, without the crutch of borrowed morality. It is instinctual, almost spontaneous and sometimes, I wonder if something is missing in me. Then, I sit by myself and let the thought beat my spirits to death, watching like a helpless spectator. No defier has ever chosen to defy. Their mere existence is defiance. “You always take the hard path”, they tell me, “which is not an error in itself, but why must you?” And I tell them, “but I don’t, I don’t pick at all. I never had a choice in this, and if I did, I made it long ago.”
My identity is a collection of oddities in a box of decisions and consequences. I listen to the jarring silence as I sit and go through it wistfully. Only because of this tendency to walk on my own, only because of this and nothing else, I have no home, and home, for me, is scattered all over. I am a cultural orphan, and all the culture I have is cherry-picked and filtered. All my identity is picked like one picks a language they don’t speak. It has taken me years to get fluent in who I am, yet there is an accent to me. There is an accent that reminds me I come from somewhere still, and I don’t belong there now, and who I am now does not fully belong anywhere. All of who I am comes from this immense cost I continue to pay every day, and it is worth it; it is worth paying the price. But there are moments where we all sit and ponder how different things would be if we had been any different, and all of us think of this, knowing all too well that we are who we are, and that is the gist of it.
There is a soft rebellion in me. I do not know what to do about it. There is no fight to fight, only a life to live, and I live it; goodness knows, I live it.