Darren M. Meade: Be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everbody else.
“B e nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight ,” E.E. Cummings offered in his advice to aspiring artists . “ You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you ,” James Baldwin argued two decades later in his fantastic forgotten conversation about identity with anthropologist Margaret Mead. “ If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble .” Both the vulnerability and the courage of that world-telling are in direct proportion to our sense of otherness — to how far the teller diverges from society’s centuries-old, dogma-proscribed, limiting ideas about the correct way to be a human being.