choosing

Grey's Anatomy Season 6 Episode 11 - I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked

Cristina asked Meredith; "If you had to choose between the thing you love to do and the person you love, which would you choose?"

Case summary: An opera singer is admitted complaining of bronchitis.  Diagnosis: Pleural Mesothelioma (Cancer of the membrane lining the lungs and chest cavity)  Possible courses of action: Removal of affected pleura and/or pneumonectomy plus chemotherapy and radiation.

Patient's reply: "I sing, it's my entire life...I’m big.  Too big.  I don’t fit in airplane seats.  And, as Jeff is always telling me, my feelings don’t always fit the situation.  If my food is overcooked in a restaurant, I get enraged.  I want to kill the waiter.  But I don’t.  I politely ask him to take my meal back and bring it to me the way I asked for it.  I spend my days making myself smaller.  Acceptable.  And that’s okay.  Because at night, when I go onstage, I get to experience the world the way I feel it.  With indescribable rage.  And unbearable sadness.  And huge passion.  At night, onstage, I get to kill the waiter and dance on his grave.  And if I can’t do that, if all I have left is a life of making myself smaller, then I don’t want to live.”

The whole "Be Yourself" schtick has been peddled from here to Timbuktu in a gazillion books and movies.  They can present it in a dozen, different ways or in a hundred, different languages but I think that opera singer said it best.  The world tells you to be true to who you really are but what if your real SELF is not something the world finds "nice" or deems "acceptable" by the normal, social parameters?  Why does the world tell you to "Be Yourself"; but if that self does not fit into the mold, the world will try to break you and if you resist long enough, it rejects you like a broken cookie.

To the world: Stop contradicting yourself.  Stop forcing me into the mold.  Stop making me choose.  Stop insisting I make myself small.