Dear R;

Phobias are a weird thing. If you go online you can find out that a person can have a phobia about just about anything from bugs, to deep water, to studying, to books, to marriage. Anything and everything can be classified as a phobia. It makes me wonder if we, as humans, are so bewildered by the world and our own mannerisms that we feel the need to label and fix everything. Are so afraid of the world and the people around us that if we don’t have a name for something we just can’t accept it.

Half of the world is on medication these days. It’s rare to find someone who isn’t dependant on something as simple as sleep aids to anti depressant. Kids are on uppers, parents are on downers, and we’re so afraid to live life naturally. Everything is a disease, everything has a name and everything has a drug you can treat it with. It’s weird, this world that we live, where we want so badly to conform to a sense of normalcy that we’ll do anything to achieve it, take any drug, go to any therapy, do anything to be normal.

Me? I want to live at night. There is just something about the nighttime that comforts me, makes me feel better. And sleeping during the day, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If anything, I sleep better during the day because the rest of the world is too busy living to hurt me. You meet really interesting people who also like to stay up at night, it’s like a club, you know that a person isn’t boring if they prefer to sleep in the daytime. They’re like you, you can relate to them, and maybe bring some of that sense of normalcy that we’re all so desperate to achieve.

Maybe I’m just pessimistic when it comes to the rest of the world, but I just don’t understand why everyone wants to be normal. They see the lives of a few people and suddenly that is the way they want to live. They want to go to their high school prom with a perfect date, with a perfect dress, have their evening go perfect, and then it’s the end of the world when the prom queen throws up on your shoes. Then there are the perfect grades, going to the perfect college, we throw around this word “perfect” like it’s something that exists. I don’t believe in perfection, I don’t think that anything can ever be perfect and part of becoming an adult is realizing that you need to love and accept things for their faults.

Maybe it isn’t normalcy that people are desperately seeking their medication and their therapy, but that elusive sense of perfection that everyone is so obsessed with. Girls starve themselves, boy pump themselves up god knows what, all for this ideological sense of what a perfect man or woman looks like. They throw away time and money on surgeries that merely change their outward appearances, things that are so shallow, trying so hard to be perfect. Yet there is nothing to change what we all are on the inside, despite how hard we may try. The person who looks perfect are usually so imperfect outside. That beautiful woman may be rotting from the inside out and you could never know it by looking at her.

Maybe it comes back to what I was originally talking about, the phobias and how everything has a name. I’m sure it’ll come down to the day when there is a phobia about being abnormal, about being different, and that will have a name and medication to go along with it. Before long, it’ll all be named and everything can be given “proper treatment.” I just have to wonder if this is the right direction the human race should be taking. Should we label everything? Should we strive for normalcy? Perfection? Are these all elusive fantasies that we are going to chase forever and never truly achieve? Or are we going to evolve past these feelings of safety and take a chance, meet new people, live in the dark when everyone else lives in light. Is there ever going to be a moment when some stands tall and says, without hesitation, that they are going to strive to be abnormal, to go against the labels, and toss all of those pills down the drain?

Probably not, but I can hope, I can hope.