You are Not Your Eyeliner

You are not the raging fear
of wrong-doing.
You are not the dripping blood
of disdain for injustice
and cruelty.
You are not sorrow,
you are not cold indifference.
You are not a straight line,
nor are you a mass of skin
that wears chains,
or points middle fingers
at the world.
You have felt the rage
once neon innocence
has faded into a deep black,
you have seen cruelty,
but you are not bound by it.
You are not boxed into the mask
that makes us easy to stick a label upon.
You are not your eyeliner--
you are compassion one day,
angst the next.
You are a wave of emotions--
do we title an ocean as a constant calm,
or an uproar of tides?
Do we classify this ocean as what we see,
or what it embodies,
what is under its surface?
An ocean is not its visibility.
You are not your eyeliner.

I don't know if it's cooler to just let a poem stand by itself in the blogesphere or to explain how this came about, but I know when I come across a poem, I'm always like:

Not so creative writer-esque of me, but hey, I'm also being trained to be a critical thinker, so there ya' go. This poem came about from a lovely run-in with a friend. We got to talking about the permanence of emotions, and how our society is expected to be happy-go-lucky-kittens-and-fucking-rainbows-let's-sit-in-a-friend-circle. I mean, when you think about it, the ultimate goal society presses on us is to be happy. But what does that look like? In one instance, we're persuaded to believe that happiness looks like this:

Then, minutes later, happiness is described as this:

They can't both be true, can they? Yet we strive for these results, because we think it is the final solution to eliminating all sadness so that we can constantly giggle and smile at the world. In the end, it's just confusing. Having that shiny new car doesn't keep us crying when so-and-so breaks our hearts, but isolating ourselves from the world doesn't shield us from the pit-in-stomach feeling.

So with the pressing expectations to constantly be happy and productive and cheerful, we just feel confused. I know I've felt like society was messing with my head more that it was helping me. I always suspected there was some evil mastermind in some corner, pouring out these paradoxical ideas of happiness, and when he saw the confused, head-spinning reactions, he was all:

I'm sorry for all the gifs. If you haven't guessed, I've just discovered Tumblr. 

Anyway. So for those of us who are prone to listen to everything that's thrown at us, we get confused and try to back out of all these promises for happiness. We reject what hasn't work, and because this "always happy" ideal has never worked in the past, we go to the exact opposite:

THE EMO STAGE!
(DUN DUN DUNNNN)
I never had a full fledged emo stage, but I sure had my share of self-wallowing, "the world will never understand me" phases. I just hadn't perfected the art of eye makeup yet. But because we are brought up in a world where we believe we are our emotions, we identify ourselves as this sadness, rather than a core self who is a mere observer of that sadness.

But if we lived in a world where happiness and sadness were both widely accepted as a passing emotion, I believe we would live with far less expectations to "be happy," and subsequently, we'd have far less lashing out by identifying with the polar opposite.

You will not always be happy-go-lucky, but you are not your sadness either.

Namaste.