As a person, you are judged. Regardless of where you take or make your stand on any spectrum, if you’re alive, you will be judged, try as you might to avoid it. You’re judged when you’re too straightforward and judged when you’re too vague. You’re judged if you stand up for yourself but you’re also judged if you simply let someone take advantage of you. You’re judged for taking yourself too seriously and judged for not taking yourself seriously enough. You’re judged if you’re too fat or too thin, too well-groomed or too unkempt. You’re judged for what you appear to be.

What about what goes unseen?

I don’t mean the stuff that happens behind closed doors but rather the deeply-rooted cluster of pain inside a person that spills over into their waking life. Does it appear as it is? A molten, stinking mass of unresolved issues and barbed despair? Or does it look like random sick-days due to mental exhaustion? Or a binge session on a Tuesday to escape suicide? Maybe it looks like an empty shell, a vessel without a captain, someone who tunes in and out of a conversation without meaning to. Maybe it’s posing as a bubbly and vibrant presence, polite and pleasant and holding it together, only to fall apart catastrophically when finally in a safe space.

Where have all the safe spaces gone?

‘Why the fuck do you need a safe space, you pansy?’ boom the voices at the back. ‘No one ever mentioned a safe space back in my day.’

Is it possible that a lack of such a space is what bred generations—an entire culture—of misguided social expectations, which led to an overwhelming proportion of the population being riddled with anxiety, laden with trauma, and filled with a sense of self-loathing that many traditional so-called ‘values’ only serve to perpetuate?

Is it possible we’d need less of a safe space if we’re allowed to be who and what we are without so MUCH intense pressure? Is it possible that the pressure that fuels change and innovation for some is the same pressure that overburdens the so-called weaker members of society? Maybe innovation can show up in other ways for other people? Is it too much to comprehend that we don’t all need the madness of competition to drive us to great things? That perhaps, stability and routine and sameness and simple peace and quiet and privacy are just as effective when it comes to productivity or creativity.

Maybe peace and madness looks a little different for all of us. If we’re not hurting anyone, why should our methods and choices be any less significant? If we are hurting someone, we should be removed from the situation. In all cases, we should be assessed for the right support and course of action. We should not be burnt at the stake without trial. We should not be penalised on assumption alone. We should not hear only one-sided testimonies. We should certainly not lose our autonomy or have our entire identity dismantled and rebuilt according to someone else’s instruction.

Do we not all matter? Are we not all human? Are we fucking accepting diversity or are we not?

No human is better than another; conditions are what shapes us and if those conditions were not desirable in early years, we spend the rest of our lives trying to reshape ourselves, all the while standing miserably in a mould that doesn’t fit, all the while listening to the messages the world sends us about how misshapen we are, all the while being expected to fit the new moulds they hand out—and be thankful while we’re at it.

Does anyone care if we don’t fit the mould? Does it matter?

When we are called inappropriate to a degree that it changes us internally, we become different versions of ourselves. Not all of those versions are better. Not all of those voices claiming improper behaviour are correct. Not every opinion counts or holds merit. When we take onboard the advice and feedback of others without paying attention to who we are as a person, we can become so internally disfigured, so unnaturally modified from our true self that we begin to fracture. We split and splinter and unravel; we follow different threads of ourselves: one for our parents, and one for work, one for going out, and one for going out out (which is really only possible with social lubricant and lots of it), one for the quiet group of friends and one for the rowdy group of friends and one for the group of friends who wholly ‘get’ us, one for our partner and one for our child and one for the person on the other end of the phone who has you pacing the floor like a warden, and somehow, in the midst of all these loose threads, there’s that last little knot, holding it all together, but incapable of weaving the threads into something whole, something worth looking at, something worth having… or at least, that’s the truth I’ve accepted.

Time, and place, context be damned, there is always someone, somewhere waiting to judge another. It’s hard to remember that our lives are our own. Our shape is ours to take. Our tapestry is ours to weave. Yet, we spend so long caught in an endless cycle of pushing expectations onto one another, from parent to child, partner to partner, adult child to elder parent, peer to peer, round and round, consistently overlooking what is true and right for the individual.

I don’t want to make this mistake with my own daughter. I want to have a view that is wide enough to see who SHE is. The things she does will differ from day to day and moment to moment and this should not be a full reflection of her character but of her ever-changing capability in ONLY THAT MOMENT. She will choose who she is, or perhaps she will simply BE who she is if she grows up in a world that gives her the freedom to do just that without unreasonable and unfair expectations.

We are expected to be flexible in a rigid system that does not allow for the nuances of the human experience.

When we burn out from trying too damn hard to lean towards what society demands of us, we are called lazy and good-for-nothing and when we fight our bodies’ needs and try to focus on even a single aspect to make up for this, we’re called obsessive or workaholic or pedantic or anal. 

We are told our thinking is too transparent and when we try to counter it, we’re called manipulative.

We’re criticised for having idealistic views and when we try to see only what’s in front of us, we’re called cynical and tactless.

We are called childish, and weird, ridiculed for having obscure and/or intense interests and hobbies and humours, and when we repress these aspects of ourselves, we become lost and are called useless.

We internalise those labels. When we see that behaviour, we reach for our most primary experience with it and hurl those same cruel labels at another person and they scoop them up and hoard them around until they have a chance to throw them back at someone else. We end up hurting one another because we’ve been hurt. We see ourselves as a bundle of inadequacies and have it reaffirmed over and over and over again only to go on and reaffirm someone else’s inadequacies further along the line, creating a web of broken humans laden with the self-belief that they are beyond repair.

When the world wants you to toughen up and be resilient, it really is difficult to do that and stay just soft and kind enough to see suffering with compassion and without hasty judgement. I may never get the balance exactly right with any of the other things society has us believing is all-important — but for myself and those around me, I have redoubled my efforts to fine-tune this and rebuild trust within myself.