Why does our culture tell cram the philosophy of reduction down our throats? For example, shed those pounds, cut those bad fats from your life, eliminate those bad habits. On one hand there’s the constant emphasis on removal, never addition. Never add good habits. It’s always a negative comment and it always cut you down, shames you. It makes you less and less of yourself. It’s designed to cut you down and whittle you into some version society deems acceptable.
Society doesn’t focus on building you up, but tearing you down.
We hear these thoughts and it filters down through our psyche until we are shrinking, slowly collapsing under the strain of fitting ourselves into that ever growing smaller box.
I am not saying all of society is like this, but at the end of the day, what does it teach us? It teaches us to cut ourselves up, to dissect others, instead of aiming to build them up. It teaches us to be our worst enemy, to reflect those whispers that can’t wait to cut us up; to slash away our ‘flaws’. Society turns our shadows and our demons into surgeons excising pieces of ourselves disguised as tumors. We see that cutting down, being critical, is the normal, and it’s hard to build ourselves up against a world that strives to diminish us, to distract us from our potential.
I want to stand strong, to reject the notion that I need to remove anything. I want to step out of the box and stand straight, to take up space, to make people see me, respect me, listen to me. I want to cultivate a culture inside of me that relies of positivity and progress.