Seriously, kids, just be yourselves...

Empty faces filling empty spaces.
Hollow hearts following a hollow beat.
Everyone's scared
No one's aware
Monotonous feet marching in a monotonous line
Straight ahead and right on time
A place to belong comes at a price
Only the crowd knows wrong and right
Everyone follows: nobody leads
No one knows who to be
Drowning in a sea of complaceny
No one cares about anything
As long as the line stays the same.

"Just be yourself."
"If people don't love you for you, they're not worth you."
"Follow your heart."
"Be the chalk, not the blackboard."
"Just be yourself."

This message of being yourself is persistantly thrown at us. It is a parent's or a teacher's favorite phrase. Books are written on it. Songs are sung about it.
And, of course, everyone likes to think that they are themselves. At least, when there are people around. But, in the quiet moments, these same people question whether they really are themselves, or whether they even know who that elusive 'self' is after all. The truth is, everyone is a little bit scared of themselves.
It is so much easier to simply follow trends than to actually become your own person.
Well, lucky for us, the new trend is being yourself. Now, it is cool to be your own person. Breaking out of the mold is the thing to do. Anticonformity is the movement of the hour.
The time has come to truly be different...
...just like everyone else.
Even in being ourselves, we can't win. Everyone is being themselves. And everyone gets their idea of who they are from the same place. So, in a sense, everyone is being different in the same way.
We can't help but conform even when we're trying to be unique. It's some sort of security to be the same as other people. Then, at least, we know that we're not weird. We're not different. But, at the same time, we're crying out for difference.
I know I've noticed this in my life. My greatest aspiration has been to just be normal, as is many other people's.
But, something else I've begun noticing: the normal people are not usually remembered. The normal people usually don't change the world. To change the world, you have to be willing to be different, truly different. It is hard to make a difference without being different.
Those with the greatest influence are seldom normal.
In fact, they're usually not.

Today's (complete random and therefore unrelated) quote:
"Trips to the dentist- I like to pospone those kinds of things" {Johnny Depp}