{"id":2016,"date":"2022-09-30T00:19:33","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T04:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2022-09-30T00:19:33","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T04:19:33","slug":"fuck-normalcy-we-all-just-want-to-be-people-let-me-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2022\/09\/30\/fuck-normalcy-we-all-just-want-to-be-people-let-me-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Fuck normalcy, we all just want to be people let me live"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I felt as if I were looking in a mirror and finally seeing myself, rather than some distorted fun-house image.”(Clare 4)<\/strong><\/p>\n

At every turn, society has something shouting out some standard that we the people are supposed to meet. There’s a “should be” for pretty much everything.\u00a0 This is especially true with gender norms because society has enforced such rigid guidelines for so long. To step out of the box, to want to be something other than pink or blue is unfathomable to some people. For other people, being able to step out of that box is a saving grace. It allows the out-of-the-box people to belong regardless of their “shouldn’t’s”. Clare’s retelling of his experience of feeling as though he looking in a mirror and seeing himself for the first time represents a coming-of-age moment that everyone has; the moment they start to realize who they are. Whether it is a physical mirror or a mental mirror, and whether or not Clare meant for this to apply to, everyone it does. The passage keeps displaying how uncomfortable Clare feels in his skin, and how he is constantly wondering his who he is. Prior to this scene of him looking in the mirror, there is just an obvious lack of security revolving around his identity which is something experienced by all at one point or another. This lack of security comes from the standards that we are brought up with. In class we discussed the standards of what one is “supposed to be” and that statement is the problem.<\/p>\n

Later on in the chapter Clare poses the question “How natural are the rigid , mutually exclusive definitions of male and female if they have to be defended…?”. (Clare 6) This further reinforces the whole idea of having to fit in a box, a really “rigid” box. “How natural?” not natural at all. Perhaps biologically the boxes of male and female could be more applicable but even then those labels don\u2019t always apply. The fact that people are raised to fit into a box creates a warped sense of self. Its societal standards and reasons like this that Clare did not begin to see he was until he was older. Instead of being more sure of himself his whole life he felt confined and not fitting into the box must have been confusing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I felt as if I were looking in a mirror and finally seeing myself, rather than some distorted fun-house image.”(Clare 4) At every turn, society has something shouting out some standard that we the people are supposed to meet. There’s a “should be” for pretty much everything.\u00a0 This is especially true with gender norms because … Continue reading Fuck normalcy, we all just want to be people let me live<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4987,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2022-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4987"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}