A face in the crowd

Fake a smile. Fake a „Thank you very much”. Fake an „I’m glad to see you, too”. Fake a tone of voice like you really mean it. Fake a reaction of surprise, joy, happiness, curiosity, support, hope. Fake a good empathy to the guy who’s in pain. Fake an offer for a shoulder to cry on. Fake regret upon refusal. Fake a promise to be there when needed.

But fake it good.

Nobody wants to know who you are, what you think, what you dream of. Keep your mouth shut and blend in. Be who you were told to be. Think what you’re thought to think. Dream what you are allowed to dream. Keep your aspiration in control and your dreams tamed. You are not the ruler of this world. You are not on top of the world. You do not make the call. You do not get to have an opinion. Blend in and lay low.

Nobody wants to know how much it hurts. Nobody is interested in your pain. Nobody cares more than in just that one second when they see you down on the ground, miserable, in your indescribable agony. Scream and no one will listen. They look at you and nod, then stand up and walk away. They need to know someone’s in pain. It makes them feel better, when somebody else is suffering a worse fate than theirs. Nobody wants to see you get better, though. You need to be right there, beneath them, for their personal reassurance that things can always be worse than what they are.

And they also prove to be.

So keep your mouth shut and just go with it. Take a job with decent money. Get married with an average person. Have two average kids, with average faces and average intelligence, hooking up with other average kids of their own age, to dream average dreams that require average determination and average passion. Take vacations to average places, staying in average hotels run by average managers who believe the serving of breakfast is a privilege in itself. Get average friends with average spouses, who only dream of the next average trip they will take or the next piece of furniture they want to change. Talk about average topics of general interest and have average opinions shared by everyone. Have an average life of average length, filled with average events of average importance.

Because face it! You are just a face in the crowd. Your voice will not be heard when you shout loud. Because you don’t get to have a voice of your own. Wise and old as you think you are, you still cannot rely only on yourself. You are not the only one making the decisions in your life. You don’t get to say a powerful YES or NO, your answer is always MAYBE. Maybe you will have the time to do that, to go there, to meet that. Maybe you will have enough money to buy that, to meet that there, to cover your expenses and save something for yourself. Maybe you will go, maybe you will try, maybe you will do. Maybe you get to time to live for yourself some time. And, if you are lucky, you get to change MAYBE into MIGHT. But that might  not happen at all.

Because you are scared of stepping out of the crowd. Because the world is big and you need to find your own little place to fit in. And big and scary as it is, you don’t want to run away from the world. So you give up. You give up dreaming. You give up hope. You give up love. You let go of yourself, telling yourself it wasn’t meant to be, the world is too big for this kind of aspiration. So you lay low. You step into the crowd and dance the crazy dance of sanity: scream what they scream, want what they want, hope what they hope, dream what they dream. Average makes it normal. Average makes you one of them. You need to be one of them.

Now take a second to think back to the time when you had dreams. Close your eyes and re-live it. Remember what you use to dream of. Remember the tingling in your fingers when you aspired for something, for greatness. Remember the heartbeat when you got a new idea, a breakthrough capable of changing the lives of many, possibly the entire world. Remember the butterflies in your stomach when you realized you can do something good, a selfless deed that would benefit everyone and would make your parents proud. Remember the passion. Remember the determination. Remember the stubbornness you had when facing the issues that could interfere. Remember the satisfaction when you solved those problems and the power it gave you to face even tougher things. Remember the joy. Remember the thrill. Remember the flow of life through your veins when dreams became reality. Remember happiness.

Now open your eyes. Is this who you want to be?