So I just finished reading this great book. A paragraph on the second-to-last page really caught my eye. As follows:
“It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn’t ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween every day, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren’t alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe. Maybe everyone else might go on thinking that people were just what you saw – the clothes, the haircuts, the cars – but not me, even though it seemed the whole world kind of worked that way: a put-on, only interested in the appearance of things like your class, your race, whether you were a girl or a boy, all the stuff you couldn’t really change anyway. It seemed really hard to grow out of that; maybe all you could do was try your best, try not to judge people from the way they appeared to be, I guess. I decided I might try to do that, try not to make decisions about everyone by what I saw because of how small and wrong that was, but it seemed that was just the way my brain worked, that all I could do was keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. I thought maybe that’s what growing up might do for me maybe, which was kind of scary.”
-an excerpt from Hairstyles of the Damned, by Joe Meno
Friendly advice, maybe…a philosophy, possibly…something to think about, DEFINITELY!!
I think we should all keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, just a little bit more and maybe we’ll all just be a little bit better for it…
Ry