I have come to a conclusion.

Actually, I have come to many conclusions as of late, however they all stem back to the same central point. In fact, I’m not quite sure conclusion is the proper word for whatever this is, as I feel like it is not an end but rather a springboard to what will hopefully be a more enlightened state of being… at least for me. But, for lack of a better word… as revelation seems too lofty, and epiphany seems too personal… conclusion shall be the word by which I will be calling this occurrence.

“What might this conclusion be?” you are probably asking. Well, I have determined that humanity is entirely disingenuous. Shocker.

We have become a society of fools, where falsified identities are the norm and we are all actors playing to a more than receptive audience. The phrase I have heard most often thrown around is something along the lines of “you are who you associate with”. By choosing to interact with a group of individuals where the primary topics of conversation revolve around who was booted off Dancing With the Stars, who is sleeping with whom and how their respective exes feel about the situation, and who was that poor soul Wednesday night who got blackout drunk and embarrassed themselves all over Asbury, we are doing a disservice to our minds.

By continuing to perpetuate this cacophony of vacuous  discourse, I feel as if we are lost. Lost amongst the struggle for something more… anything more… to carry us towards tomorrow. We settle. We may find ourselves dressing a certain way, listening to certain music, going to certain parties, as to adhere to a certain standard of expectations as defined by the community. We assimilate.

I am not trying to say that I am innocent of this discourtesy, nor am I classifying this as the definitive way by which the myriad of acquaintances with whom I have interacted with in the past conduct themselves. I am just so intensely frusturated by this that I want to shout from the rooftops

“WAKE UP!”

It is easy to be complacent. It is easy to fall into a routine of mindlessness, blindly following the pack into the desert of uninspiring confabulation until you’re begging for an oasis with an iota of intellect… lest it be a mirage.

How do we release ourselves from this intellectual and societal serfdom? How do we go about reclaiming our true selves? Our genuine, enticingly passionate, irrefutably brilliant selves?

We stop asking permission to listen to NPR. We dress how we choose because it makes us happy, not anyone else. We stop making fools of ourselves in public. We start respecting ourselves and showing compassion and being whomever we are in the moment.

We start showing that we have no shame. We are SHAMELESSLY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. We do not have to answer to anyone except ourselves… and it is time we start acting like it.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” –  Kurt Vonnegut