Part XXI - The Bars

There will come a time when you will be subjected to your limitations. Those ceilings and walls that are built by your family, teachers and society. You will feel constrained and your calls for an explanation will reflect that familiar chant, 'it's just the way it is.' You will want to know why, but all you will get for an explanation is, 'learn to deal with it.' You begin to realize that why is an impossible question to answer. It has millions on definitions and most of those seem to be fitted for the occasion and the style of those differences that others are delighted to see in you. Those traits that are easily understood for the sense of sight is the greediest of all.

You will either conform or be crushed or find resilience through your personal determination. There is a failure by those in control of your faculties in these times. There is an obvious contradiction, they trim your peculiarities but welcome your ability to occupy yourself. These failures result is that massive place within your creativity that houses your imagination, those concepts and their illusions that become so real to you. Your fantasy world builds you daydreams and escapes from the monotony of the daily schedule. Your body runs with the flock as your mind flees the situation. The saving nap from boredom has become the flight of creativity and its ability to make the same old into the brilliantly new.

You will be targeted if your addiction to anywhere but here becomes overtly noticeable. You will be chastised by remarks in the classroom such as, 'are you with us, hello in there, and please join us.' Your schoolmates will mimic these remarks at recess, but it is not their fault, for they are good little parrots who have been taught to react in the proper order, but still your individuality is in question. Reports of your behaviours will be brought home by you so the taunts can be handed over to those that worry if you will be well adjusted. You are being fitted for life within the capsule called humanity, a place where differences are only tolerated if they can pay their own way.

If by chance a welcomed deformity has been detected, you will be granted the space required for your speciality. Talent will save you from the stream of the same, for it separates you from the having to be normal. However, if you are not then placed with others like you, your social adjustments will be strained with the heavy pressures of jealousy, envy and placement in to the category of the handicapped. The tribe needs your difference badly but childhood is full of insecurities and anyone that is thought of as better than the rest must be avoided without mercy. Scars are deep but in their place is the unrestrained imagination and the worlds it creates for you to climb into.

Separation comes swiftly as the normal walk in unison. You have taught them that difference must be avoided all cost. To be included means that you can then foster cliques and small groups within the leagues within the accepted. You have proved that being normal can be attained if you throw away large portions of your distinctiveness. The normal will never be alone for the shallow waters are teaming with similarity because the depth within needs time in order to speak about the value of difference. Childhood realities become the structures that adults build their lives upon, even though, as time mists by, certain occasions will occur when all of it feels so useless.