Make a fool of yourself

what doing splits at parties taught me

I’ve noticed that people don’t really smile anymore at least not genuinely. Perhaps they’re worried about the wrinkles that form in the moment, their disastrous laugh, or maybe it’s the fear that if they smile too fully, something terrible will follow to balance the joy. People don’t really laugh anymore. Maybe they’re afraid their stomach will hurt or that they’ll look too human in doing so.

It’s as if everyone is walking on eggshells with themselves, afraid to face a mirror and see what’s buried beneath the grin. What are we all so afraid to find — that we’ve become hollow? That under the skin-deep performance, the soul has stopped moving?

We write essays about how ‘the art of conversation is dead’, how ‘flirting is dead’, how ‘love is dead’. Though those are pertinent questions, they don’t go deep enough. To all that, I add one more: why are you dead? Why have you let your soul be strangled by performance and comparison? Why do you keep yourself on a leash so tight it’s cutting into the flesh? Why are you so ashamed of experiencing yourself?

Tyler the Creator once looked around a room full of people dying to move to throw their arms up, swing their hips, but being so frightened, they stood still. On top of that, they sneer when someone dares to take the leap, or worse, they admire from afar, wishing it were them on that podium, wishing they didn’t so desperately hate themselves. To counter that he made a “weird” album, one where you stop overthinking that much and dance. An album with the goal of letting go of all the expectations and feeling, that says a lot about the state of our society.

Last week I went to a party. I entered the room energetically just to be met with static people. The music was good, some were even talking but none were breathing. It was always controlled looks, faces and things to say as if we all held the same list with the same questions. So, what do you study? Where are you from? Sure those can be good openers to intresting conversations but they turned out fake. In a matter of seconds i’d already forgotten and so did they I assume. A couple cocktails after, it was better, people were more bolder now that they could blame it on the drinks but the intrests in which they had in each other was bland. I secretely turned up the volume knowing the neighbors might complain but I didn’t care. I had made it all the way here through Amsterdam’s wind and rain, i was not going to waste my Friday by side-stepping every now and then and asking every damn body what they do for a living. I convinced someone to dance, the other to start a happy birthday chant and in those moments I could see everyone finally breathing the same air. I think after having seen someone embarrass themselves (or honestly do what they want with no regards of who’s judging) they felt less constricted to hold up such a heavy fake image.

You always think it’s the others until you notice that you never post on Instagram because you’re convinced people will devour your picture, shred it to pieces, and judge every inch of it. You think it’s others until you stop wearing strapless tops because overflowing stretch-marked breasts are no longer trending. You think it’s others until you can no longer laugh without rehearsing it first. It’s not entirely your fault you’re pressured to maintain a perfect feed, a specific aesthetic, a we’ve-seen-it-before identity. You’re told not to color outside the lines. But the truth is, you’re the one who chooses to worship these rules as if they were holy.

People don’t want to make fools of themselves anymore. They don’t want to stumble while entering a room, to fumble their words, to make a bad joke or a bad cake to simply be bad. They don’t want to dirty their hands, to smudge their carefully curated, angelic personas, they don’t want to live anymore. It’s like they’ve lost all substance. They’re full of shit, I’ll tell you that. Chances are, they’ve got nothing to give you. Only your gaze gives them meaning, only the thoughts you form wake them from their torment, and then—and only then—do they finally descend into something real.

People don’t embarrass themselves anymore. They don’t know what it means to be themselves because they’ve never been given the chance to love. To love the weird books, the strange art, their moles and pores, to love themselves. Instead, they become copies of those they admire, those who seem to have the secret of life. Now we all dress the same, speak the same, laugh at the same intervals and it drives me mad, to go through the same conversations, the same mechanisms it truly drives me mad. I am tempted to ask: what happened to our humannness? Our loyalty to ourselves?

People like to say there’s no such thing as original art that someone somewhere has already thought it, said it, drawn it. In my opinion that’s a deeply depressing way to characterize the human soul. I am my own canvas—maybe I’ll resemble you, but I’ll never look like you, our voices might share a pitch, but yours will never crack the way mine does when I’m passionate. Even if we think the same thought, we don’t see it the same way. Your experiences aren’t mine, however much they resemble each other.
That’s what I mean by humanness, the way we’re all experiences, emotions, senses, dreams compressed into these fragile, temporary bodies and yet we all want to become angels, to erase delete, and polish away everything others might hate.

People don’t want to be human anymore. They want to be efficient, perfect, methodological, never wrong, never opposed. But that craving to become a machine won’t save you from the deep hatred you’ve been taught to carry around. Interacting with machines might be easier but it doesn’t make you better. It doesn’t even make you feel better, because a bot will never understand what a soul is how it aches, how it links to another.

There’s this split second in every real conversation right after you’ve said what you mean, and you’re terrified. You’ve revealed too much, you can’t take it back, can’t laugh it off. You must face it, face another person who now knows something intimate about you. But oh, the thrill when their eyes light up, their faces fill with color when they’ve just fallen a little in love with what you said. That’s when the weight on your soul lifts, if only for a moment.

In reality, your nonchalant act is hiding a deep self-hatred, your carefully planned vitamin detox is just an exorcism of imaginary evil, your instagram highlights are as fake as your laughs and it shows. The only cure which I know of is to desperately live more. To speak and understand yourself, to try a little harder, to not be ashamed of what you love.

And I’m not saying this to shame you, or to make you hate yourself (more), or to pretend I’m holier than thou. If I’m being real, when I was at that party I kept looking over my shoulder, wondering if I was doing the right things, if I weren’t too awkward. I’m writing this because I know the dread after posting one story too many, the pinch in your chest when no one laughs at your joke, the way you rehearse conversations in your head, wondering how you’re being perceived. I do it all—if not more. Honestely, I have too many questions banging on the barriers of my head, creating clouds of worryness because I do not know how things will turn out.

But I’m too much of a romantic to give up so easily, crushed by imaginary walls.
I’m too afraid that my time on earth will be useless that all this suffering won’t create something beautiful. So I dare and fail but still, I dare.

Call it boldness or whimsy or whatever really just allow yourself to be almost childlike to know who you are or you’ll wake up one day and realize that your wish to hide and run away from experiences has made you an old morose bitch.