Alone at 3 am

Almost two months ago, my Boy started his job for Hewlett-Packard in Ireland, and I got re-familiarized with the problem of no one to bother with my thoughts at 3 am. I just can't be bothered to get out of bed, start my laptop, and send out messages to people who might be awake/at home at that time. It's so much easier to just poke my SO's side and spout off my thoughts. Even mostly still asleep, Boy understands my thought processes in ways very few others understand even fully awake.

But I digress.

One of these thoughts was born from John Green's books "Looking for Alaska" and "Paper Towns", and it's the concept of imagining other people complexly. Being a Nerdfighter working where I work, I am confronted with this concept on an almost daily basis. I meet and work with all kinds of people, and many of them have just given up on ever re-integrating into "normal" society (explaining the Employment Agency's attempts at jigging the statistics would take too long for this post) and many of them have become bitter and cynical. Looking beyond the first layer of jaded cynicism can be really hard, but once I start pulling at leads hidden beneath that first layer, I often find kind people who have been disappointed and hurt times beyond counting. It is painful to see and it's so much easier to just stay on that first layer. To return bitterness with indifference and mean comments in kind.

Imagining the people around you complexly is hard. The human brain prefers easy categories and labels. Gay, straight, man, woman. Perfect. Ugly. Feminine. Masculine. These are labels the brain likes.

It is when we can look beyond the labels that we realize that an individual is so much more complex and infinitely more interesting than any label.

Like the biochemist co-creating the world's largest video convention (VidCon), the electrician working as server admin for HP, or a porn star with a Masters in horticulture.

Like the woman who once dreamed of stage acting and now is planning to open a alternative clothing store.

People who don't know us will label us, for their comfort and convenience. It is up to us to shine brighter than the labels and to make our own path. To me, the first step towards that is to imagine others as more than a collection of labels.

DFTBA