stop objectifying yourself and other people & choose betrayal

on continually rehumanizing ourselves by gleefully betraying expectations

You need to humanize yourself and other people quickly. As soon as possible, you have to take all of us down from any pedestal you have climbed to or been placed on or positioned someone else on or affirmed their position on, because on the pedestal you feel like you’re in the crisp, clean light of the sun but from where they’re standing you are a walking glare. No one is a human once they are on a pedestal. Pedestals always crumple up like aluminum foil under our human weight. Up there, you’re an object and no longer part of the world.

Being on a pedestal means you’re no longer allowed to be human — no dimension, no evolution, no growth, no imperfection allowed — but you will never be good enough for the pedestal either (never mind feeling good enough for it), because it’s a goal post that will always keep moving and it never breathes with you. The more the world says or even thinks they like you, the more they’ll hate you for betraying the trophy-cased image they loved. The trophy case is always a cage, to paraphrase a blessed hymn of the early aughts.

We need to treat the absurd as absurd: it is absurd to expect someone to be spotless and unflawed, or to be finished growing and becoming when we find them and always remain the same person they were, or to always do the right thing and never upset us or disagree with us. These are dehumanizing and impossible expectations, and we need to treat that dehumanization and impossibility with the absurdity it warrants. It’s a practice that deserves to be laughed at. The people we admire and love and respect are going to be revealed to be humans who let us down and diverge from us at some point. It might feel like a betrayal. You’re going to betray others in this way too, and you have to.

This is a necessary betrayal. You need to betray their expectations with a self-devotional hymn and you need to do it quick. Rip off the bandaid, throw your head back, laugh or cry or whatever into the night. You must let other people betray your expectations too. We need to take pleasure in betraying expectations. We need to delight in disregarding the expectation to become crystallized in iconographic infamy and forever held to a standard of our best angles in the best lighting with the best airbrushing. If the world loves your image, they don’t actually love you. Delight in shattering the walls of the trophy case to prowl the land once more.

This has to be thrilling; you can’t be too hesitant or unsure and you certainly can’t apologize for betraying the absurd expectation to remain the static doll in a display case. You don’t go to confession after these daily acts of betrayal and rebellion. You eat a celebratory slice of cake off of the special china on a Thursday afternoon in a ball gown if you feel like it. You need to remember how it felt the first time you diverged from your mother and reward yourself for being able to do that every day. You can hardly hold back a moan when you strip off the clothes you didn’t want to wear to begin with, or the clothes you loved but grew bored with because they’re not you anymore.

What I’m talking about here is rehumanizing. It feels good to be who you are and to be okay with others being who they are, free of any labels, no matter how terribly or well they once fit, doesn’t it? That is why you must take pleasure in rebellion. The doll in the display case apologizes for seeming human, for walking beyond the bounds of her display case, for moving her arms or mouth or aging. The human being accepts, and grows wild.