Tag: Socrates

Brownness

Image: A Blog Post

Sanjay Sabarwal
Love of Beauty, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image by Glenn Franco Simmons via Flickr

mage by Matthew Stillman
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mess up your hair. If you are wearing makeup – smudge it. If you have a pair of pants that dont really fit you – put them on. Put on a top that doesn’t go with those pants. Go to your sock drawer. Pull out two socks that don’t match. Different lengths, materials, colors, elasticity.

Now two shoes. You know the drill.

Need to add more? Ties? Hair clips? Stick your gut out? I trust you to go further.

Take a picture.

Get ready to post it online.

Are you feeling dread? Excitement? Is this not the image you have of yourself? Write about the fear or the thrill that this raises in you? Who do you need to look good for and what story does it tell about you? Or why don’t you care?

(Author: Matthew Stillman)

So the last prompt is here and its about your image and although it focused on the visual, I realize my dread is more for the lack of future prompts.  The image in my head for myself is ugly in terms of lack of focus and the emptiness of desire for being better.  Physically. I have finally come to terms that while I used to nerd in High school, I have grown up and not the dark, skinny ugly kid anymore.  A particular images comes to mind when I write this.  I was in Junior high and 2 kids were mocking each other and then suddenly one of them says atleast your not him! (point to me).  That moment was one of the only times where I truly felt ugly but the reason was more than physical, it was the realization that the first time anyone in that class had even acknowledged me even thought we had been together for year!  Wow, it took my ugliness to be mocked for me to get any attention, a life lesson that stayed with me a while and made me think I could never get with anyone remotely good looking.  That is the power of bad words, to inflict pain well after the mocking is done.  That’s what my image has come down to, being in that room being repeatedly made aware of how ugly I am.

 

Today, that image has faded away not because it’s not true, but because I no longer give it the power it had on me before.  The image is now that of someone committed, someone who knows what he wants, and someone who will achieve more than what those idiots were going on about in that small room.

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