Be proud, or get a life!

Those pages, with poems that can reach straight to your heart, kept on piling up in the personal diary of the mother, who, whenever could get the time, let her emotions flow into beautiful poetry. Alas! No one knew about them, not even her family. So no one could appreciate them. What if they judged her by reading them? What if they thought that they were a reflection of her own life, and started sympathising with her? They were merely poems that she wrote out of sheer pleasure. What if no one understood that?
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As the young lad made his way to the auditorium with his ballet shoes- yes! Ballet shoes- in his bag, he felt the tingle of nervousness in his stomach. Yet, he was sure that those were certainly not the ‘good butterflies of the stomach’ that turn nervousness into excitement before the auditions. The nervousness was the type that turned into fear when you stand on the stage in front of the whole crowd, the fear that the audience would judge before even giving him a chance, the fear that he would have an image stuck to his personality throughout his life, if he didn’t get the acceptance he deserved.
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That attire was good-to-go for college according to her, yet she had to be sure of her physical appearance. She kept looking in the mirror several times to save herself from the scrutinising eyes of her friends, close friends, class friends, the occasional ‘Hi and Bye’ friends, acquaintances and maybe potential crushes or mere on-look-ers. While, those cargos and tank top pretty much made her style, and screamed what she really was- a carefree young lass who is only stepping out to make a difference in her own way- now had to change in a regular jeans and starched and tucked-in shirt. She was afraid of the judgement- the judgement by the people she might run into during the day.
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On several occasions we come across situations where we are afraid that people might judge us. We are afraid of being constantly scrutinised by our own people, of the fact that the world expects us to be a person that we probably aren’t, that if we let our true selves be revealed, we won’t be accepted. So, we try to fuse in, changing ourselves at several points of time and embracing alien ways of living, as those are what must define us to the people around us, and in the process, we lose ourselves. We are lost to an alien that has now impersonated us, merely because we let it. The consequence: we may be able to don another skin so that people could identify with us (or maybe so that we identify with people) but, we can’t do it for long. We feel uncomfortable and out of place. We crave to be back in own skin. We look for people who would understand us for who we really, but, it may be too late. The friends we have like us for being someone we aren’t and the friends we could have are invisible to us, probably do not exist in our world. Life becomes a depressing cobweb. 
The world puts on us, a zillion unsaid conditions that we have to constantly remind ourselves of. We can’t be archaic, we can’t be orthodox either. Yet, we can’t be of novel mind-sets. Our words carry no value if we go ahead and give a free advice to someone who needs it, and if we don’t, we are tagged as indifferent. We can’t be too outgoing given the temperament of the society, yet, we have to for our peers and for ourselves. We have to choose our words, think to ourselves and be careful of not being loud. And there are a deluge of circumstances where we have to think twice, thrice or may be tons of times before taking a step. With all the dilemma hovering in the little grey matter of ours, that is already too busy working to make a stable career (which, again, was prudently chosen keeping in mind that the society in general shouldn’t be judgemental about our intellect, or seriousness towards life, or character, or maybe another parameter altogether which is not even remotely related to the choice of one’s career), we need to let our emotions flow out in front of someone who understands us and likes us for being our real selves.
That ‘someone’ can be us, when we try to introspect, give ourselves some time, think about what we want from life and what we want to give life. That ‘someone’ may even be a close friend- a person you can speak your heart out to, and mind my words, you find them RARELY. They are to be treasured. They are precious. And just when we think that we can be ‘US’ in front of someone without being judged, you are judged and tagged again. For being with her/him.
In this entire conundrum, where do we seek the answers? Who is to be blamed? Who is to improve?
The world IS there to be judgemental, we are old enough and we have lived enough to understand that by now. How much we are affected by the judgement, whether we turn a deaf ear to it or listen and change ourselves for them, is a choice that WE make and a decision that that WE take. Why blame anyone for letting the alien in and impersonate us?
We are what we are.
 Be proud.
 Or get a life!