I’m The First Of My Kind To Walk On The Earth; What About You?

“Maybe adulting is about watching your bubble burst, your belief system crumble,” says the poet. “but would you have been different have you not been told how to be?”

Would you have been any different, had you been the first of your kind?

If there was nobody to tell you what ‘normal’ was, how would you really unwind?

Would you walk the same walk? Or would you bow down to gravity, and take after our ancestors for good measure,

Or would you stand up a little straighter, no longer weighed down by societal pressure?

If killing was not a crime, would you turn into a hound, hunting deep into the wild,

Or would you join the tribe of the meek, and discover camouflages to escape and hide?

If you were the first man to walk the face of earth, and happened to discover another of your kind,

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Would you yearn to be listened to, to share a piece of your mind?

Would you discover language together? Would you marvel at how mere sounds,

Used in combinations can mean something – that to then be heard, there are no bounds.

If you weren’t taught the single correct response to “How are you”,

Would you have been honest for once? Would you still have built these walls of lies around you?

If friends, family, and strangers, were words that you could brand people with,

Would you have found it easier to pull certain people closer, and cast the others aside, like rotten filth?

I think of these things sometimes. do you?

Because I have been proven wrong at almost everything that I once thought was true.

The good and bad, once black and white, is now just one big pool of grey.

In this confusion, is a constant need for an escape, a distraction, a meaningless conversation; anything to help look away.

Maybe adulting is about watching your bubble burst, your belief system crumble;

Yet, getting down on your knees to build again, sometimes before the wounds have fully healed from your last stumble.

Maybe it is about unlearning every single thing that we have learnt, and shutting out the world, to look within for your worth;

Because if you look at it in a way, each of us really are, you see –  the first of our kind, to set foot on earth.

A version of this was first published here.

Image source: shutterstock

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