Monday, September 29, 2014

Don't You Tell Me

I know my life. You know yours. 

We as a people are always studying and trying to find out how everything in this universe works. Whether it is the forces of nature or how the mind works, we are always trying to find out new information. 

And that is perfectly fine. This is what people do as their jobs or even as their passions. And then we read about them, if we are lucky enough to stumble upon their findings. We learn, we observe, we try to fit this information into our own lives. And that is perfectly fine.

But don't you tell me about my life and my thoughts and my feelings. 

There is only one expert on me.

I know myself better than anyone else in this world. Others may have known me for a long and have come to find a lot about me, but they will never know me like I do. I'm sure that people have felt similar feelings as I have, but I feel like there has to be differences between in the ways that people feel. I don't think that we can express every feeling that we have, so maybe we have feelings that other people will never in their lives come close to feeling. 

So how do you group me? How do you group me with all women? How do you group me with people I don't know?

Tonight, I was told that women are not able to accept that they don't know how to do something. This came up because I said I couldn't sing. I admitted I can't sing and suddenly, I am grouped with billions of other women. BILLIONS. If even five percent of women were to live up to what I was told tonight, there is no statistical evidence to support that women as a whole are not able to accept when they don't know how to do something. 

Then again, a man told me this. Not even a man that regularly interacts with women. Pretty much a reclusive man told me about women.

If he told me that women get their periods after puberty I wouldn't have cared. That's actually a fact and can be supported by statistical evidence.

Unlike my uterus, my thoughts cannot be explained by my status as a woman. Just like a penis does not define a man's thoughts. 

Not to be rude to all men, but those sporting some extra extremities have been known to think that they know what's best for women. 

Honestly, I don't even know what is essentially best for women. All I know is what's best for me. 

Why should anyone tell anyone else how to live their life? Or tell them how they live their life when they do not even know what's happening inside.

Our society stresses individualism over the community and that is fine. But if we are going to live this way, we need to stop telling people how they should be living their life. This includes grouping people and making asinine assumptions about how a certain person thinks or should think. 

The ongoing fight for women's equality is trumped by assumptions such as the one I said above. I would love to be treated as an equal to every male, but some men still think in primitive terms. Males have been dominant since the beginning of the human race. Or so men keep telling us. But one man has given the women's rights fight a fighting chance. That man is Charles Darwin. Women and men can evolve into equal creatures. Hopefully, the evolution of equality won't take millions of years.

Don't tell me about me and I won't tell you about you. 

This is what I saw on my pier tonight. What will you see on yours?