Out of the box

I dread the word group- I dread being boxed up and defined. Look at human race, the moment we define ourselves as belonging to a nation, as belonging to a religion or a sect, we turn from human beings to something else. Belonging to a group can ignite  passions to give up the reason we live - to be alive, mass beliefs can raise us to be either a monsters with no sign of humanity, to kill with no remorse and to hate a race as a whole in the name of patriotism or religion.

Belonging requires you to be exclusive to a group, a community. Belonging mandates you to resign yourself to be defined, to be tagged. My refusal to let my identity be defined by language, religion or regionalism comes at a price of being isolated in the crowd. When you believe in something, you are simultaneously rejecting contradictory beliefs.

All my life, I have struggled to fit in. I am not sure if it is my own resistance to change, or my insistence at doing things my own way,but fitting in has always been a challenge for me. The appropriate word of course would be to belong .

It  is a challenge to be undefined, unlabelled,  and generic. It is of course a bigger challenge to not judge and label others.Intellectual, artsy, traditional, modern, whatever be the term, labels box you, close you up. The journey in trying to be everything, results in you being  nothing and the price one pays for it is of loneliness. As human beings we all have this innate desire to belong, to have at least that one person who understands our inner conflicts, who can look past our flaws and look into our soul.There are times when  the search to belong, to find that one soul who understands the torment leads me to be a people pleaser, a pseudo extrovert.

We are of course a bundle of contradictions, mutually exclusive desires fighting to find dominance. The need to belong in a constant battle with the need to be true to myself.