bee yourself

sorry to all my faithful blog followers, I think I may have 1, that I havent been blogging in the past few days. I have had many an inspired moment in which I saw clearly what my mind wished to state and my body rushed to the keyboard to make the thoughts words. But alas, I was foiled by an internet connection failure. That problem is behinds us now and I am ready to write my first real blog.
In the future I have considered many possible careers for myself that are as varied as the smells in the jungle but I have come to understand recently that they all have one aspect in common. I wish to be involved in the world in such a way that I am able to comment on and possibly change the way our society operates. Particularly I wish to influence the ways in which our society represents and reciprocates itself through tradition, media and culture. I suppose that is why I've begun blogging.
One problem I have always seen in the world is that people always think of reality as either fairy taleish and overly positive and magical or as a losing, depressing battle that is just a fight to delay failure rather than a chance to succeed. It's never looked at simply for what it is. People just don't seem to realize reality realistically.
The area which I will write of today is one of tradition and somewhat of culture. It involves the maturation process, a part of growing up. We are all given the same trite, thoughtless advice as our elders received when they were your age. The worst advice that these old timer's give has always been and probably always will be, unless my blog becomes wildly popular, the simple statement of, " be yourself." This quick, seemingly wise remark is the cause of more miscalculations and bad decisions than ignorance because it is trying to force a decision out of that ignorance. As we grow up the main goal through it all is to figure out who "myself" is in the scheme of things. The process is a mighty complicated one because we are being fed contradictory signals about everything from everybody at all times. WIth the idea of trying to find out who "myself" is throughout this both the bad and good decisions throughout this trial can be seen for what they are. They are just a small misstep in finding out who "myself" is, just a failed experiment to be retried after changing the variables.
What the advice of be yourself does to young people is puts the idea in their head that they should know who they are from the start and if they arent exactly sure where they fit in in the scheme of things that something is terribly wrong with them. It adds urgency to the idea of finding onesself. In haste young people form or join existing cliques in order to find something predefined that they can just pop into. It is avoiding the work of really thinking of yourself in relation to everyone else  and how you fit in. It is like trying on a bunch of mediocre clothes to see which fit best when in reality one should just make some clothes themselves that would fit perfectly.
           Encouraging kids to be individuals and be themselves when they really have no idea who they are is what causes kids to define themselves by generalities and extreme absolutes rather than balance out all their intricacies into something that is just right. It's much easier to refer to a handbook than it is to write your own. Thats why I think it would be far better to do away with this "be yourself," nonsense, at least until someone knows who they are it's as Ralph Ellison stated in his novel 'Battle Royal' - "All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.  I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.  I was naïve.  I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.  It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:  that I am nobody but myself." or it as I would say, "figure out who you are, any mistakes you make along the way dont really count" or to go even further, " mistakes don't count unless you know who you are and who you are is making them."