..As a kid i was quite the rebel, questioning anything i was confronted with..A little more than two decades later i am still the same..A lot of people thought i will ‘change’ with time and adhere to norms of society (even if they made no sense)..Nothing changed..I became more of who i am..And i am very happy with the way i think..even though some times the closest of my people feel that maybe if i ‘changed’ a little..it’ll be better for my own good..Why do people not realize that changing yourself, your essential being is like cheating on the way you were created..Isn’t my happiness all that should count? My being different – is it some sort of a threat to people around me?? Or is the selfish human nature which has since times immemorial criticized for thinking ‘out of the box’ ? I feel both..Not even one example we have in history where an individual was appreciated at the first instance for being different..Criticism, for me is quite a motivation..Criticism and me go so hand in hand..We have a kind of special bond now..And i believe that i am criticized because people feel that i am in some way more ‘progressive’, more ‘liberal’ and most of all FREE than they are..Free from the dogmas, the narrow outlook, the shackles of society..It does get painful at times when people consider you insane for the way you think..At least for a lot of years it was..The feeling when i thought that is everything ok with me..? How do i not connect to people that fast..? why don’t our mental faculties meet..? why doesn’t’ the societal issues bother them as much as they bother me..? Now after so many years the world at large speaks of the very same issues, i feel ‘ “o yes i was way way ahead of my age..my time”..
..And now is the time i realize that being the way i am has helped me in so many ways..i have never allowed anyone to suppress me or my way of thinking..people can agree with me or disagree with me..that is up to them but NOBODY can ever impose things i do not want to conform to..and that is what makes me FREE..At times i find myself standing alone..as if the entire world has gone against me..In moments like that i tell myself..If this is the price for being ‘YOU’..be it..We humans have ‘evolved’ over a period of thousand years..we have fought endless battles to find our freedom..so now when we finally are living in a world where we are entitled to have independent opinions and being FREE .. why are we so scared to be that way??I am proud of who i am..i am not perfect. i have a lot of flaws but those flaws can improve over time..what will not improve over time is my essential ‘self’ being chained ..that too for things that don’t really matter..So i choose to remain the way i am..Life is a journey of self-refinement..a process of transformation..We have got just one life and that according to me cannot be wasted in being ‘somebody else’ just for approval by people who will never matter..I refuse to live in fear, i refuse to be chained and i refuse to NOT BE ME.. The time when i will be minutes away from parting from this world and my entire life will appear in front of me like a series of images in a slideshow, i will feel happy that i did not waste a lifetime just eating, sleeping , drinking and procreating..I want to live ‘being me’ and die ‘being me’..Therefore no matter how much the criticism, how much the enslavement by society , i refuse to budge from my stand..i am happy ‘being free’..i am happy ‘being me’.. !!!