2 de março de 2021

A world with no defaults

Sometimes I imagine - probably because I've seen too many Isekais - what would happen if a chunk of humanity was transported to a world that has never seen prejudice. Not that I believe that it could be possible, even if there was proof of other worlds being inhabited by species that resemble humans, since people will always notice and judge differences. But doesn't matter, this is all hypothetical.

The point is, I'm always caught in my personal wishes. I always imagine how it would feel like, for people like me, to see same-gender love and nonbinary people as commonly as non-cishet people - and that logic holds up for people often underrepresented or discriminated, but I'm speaking about personal matters right now. I imagine the complexity of relationships that would exist if our society didn't believe that love implies sex, commitment to a single person, or perpetuated the idea that the limit between a friendship and a romantic relationship is always clear without providing space for other types of relationships to exist. 

That makes me emotional. That makes me frustrated and angry, because that level of normalization is completely unattainable in our world. Even if we get to a point where all the things mentioned above are common - among other things, like equal rights for people of any social minority and balanced representation - there will always be a certain weight to it: A pressure to perform well so that we are worthy of the opportunity to be in a position of power; The notion that we should feel grateful for being born in a time when we have rights; People looking at someone living, and reminding them that we would not be able to live like that before; The idea that there weren't as many of us before, when that is not even true - we were simply hidden, or didn't have the language and concepts to understand ourselves...

In a world without the history of prejudice that we have here, started with a blank slate, the people who lived there would not value it in the same way that we would, but the meaning and peace and SILENCE we could feel in a place like that would be welcomed.

Silence, yes. From all of the voices telling us how we are supposed to feel, all the reminders of how we are lucky to be allowed to exist when we are wrong... That kind of thing is only silenced when we are surrounded by community for so long, that we start forgetting that we are not considered normal. We make our own new normal, we forget that society has a "default". It's almost strange when we return to the rest of society or take a break from community for a while, and are reminded of how things work. 

In a world where we never had to go back to what our society deems as normal, where a default doesn't exist and there wasn't a specific model we could conform to or deviate from... we would actually be able to be ourselves.