Pride

Just a little thought:

When you put hours of work into something, whether it's an essay, or an entire iPod's worth of tunes, or a cake; anything quantifiable that can be judged by another. When you've put as much thought and effort into it as you possess, and you really think you've done a good job. The emotion when you get that piece of work back, and the person marking it put nowhere near as much effort into looking at it as your attempt deserved, or someone scrolls through your music ("You still listen to them?) or someone disagrees with your cake-decorating style.

Your righteous anger when you've worked truly hard at something, and it's just not appreciated as it should be.

I wish that's how people could be when any platform, be it a television programme or an advert or an acquaintance, makes you feel bad about how you look.

'Hey, Big Shot, I've created this body with 19 year's worth of thoughts and experiences, of course you won't think it's perfect, because you have an entirely different idea of perfection to me.

But it's too late. I've put all this effort in and now I'm not going back. This is what I think is right, and I've got the evidence to prove it. I'm alive, aren't I?

Just because we have a difference of opinion over this, it doesn't mean either of us is wrong. But you should know that you can't change my view by looking down on me.

We make up a diverse and interesting world, and we need a world's population's worth of thoughts to make it as rich as it can be.'

Our appearance and our actions, all going in to create the delicious assortment of humans there are.

Stay positive, and stay yourselves.

Yours, proudly,
Abby

Binary

We like things to be simple. Easy to work out.

If we can't work something out, we like to have an assumption to fall back on. Gives us security, because we like to know things. Stuff. We can see this through scientific experiment, the constant questioning of our existence and the world around us, and the appearance through the ages of religion, to comfort and explain.

You know what's not simple? People.

Think about objects you can put into nice categories. Cars, bicycles, trains, and a finite number of objects we ride on/in are 'methods of transport'. French, Japanese, German and Sign Language and a finite number of ways of communication are 'languages'.

You know what you can't put into categories? People.

We wish it were easier. We wish there were good people and bad people. Did you know that under Gaddafi, Libya's literacy rate went from below 20% up to 85%? Jus' sayin'. Good people to bad things sometimes, and bad people do good things sometimes.

There aren't only normal people and weird people. There aren't only people who think like you, and people who don't. There aren't only atheists and religious extremists. Everybody's a mixture of everything, and we all believe little bits of everything.

You see, the problem with the boxes and the labels and the filing cabinets we insist on creating for everyone else is that soon you put yourself in one, too. The two categories which follow logically are unfortunately, 'Us and Them'. It seems so unfair to ourselves, is the human race really as boring as all that?

Let's celebrate our differences, and love our individuality. Let's recognise that the categories containing humans are infinite, as much as are the fingerprints we leave behind.

Yours, uniquely,

Abby