Identity.

You don't know who I am. I don't know who you are. We are the only people in the world who can fully understand ourselves and it leaves us standing rather alone. Unless somebody has acquired an ability to mind read we really are just 7 billion islands floating separately as in our minds we grow and nurture a sense of being.

There is no way of fully knowing another human being. We may understand their behaviour, study their habits and learn to predict how they think but we can never know exactly what they are thinking within the many layers of consciousness the brain is supporting.

This ambiguity between each and every one of us strongly upholds the necessity we have for identity. Identity is the way we build bridges between each island as we project an idea of who we believe ourselves to be onto our exterior image. We wear different types of clothes to distinguish the certain community, religion or sub culture we are a part of - an indicator of a thought process: conformist or non conformist? We share music tastes, create fan clubs and idolise celebrities collectively to demonstrate what and who we identify with culturally. We keep mementos in our bedrooms with pictures and souvenirs and old toys to document our past identity and how it has accumulated to our current one. We label our personalities with "neurotic" "happy-go-lucky" "laid back" "highly strung" to indicate to others how we respond to emotion and how that affects our being.

I express my thoughts and ideas with anyone who will listen, preferably through the medium of writing, in order to imprint my own identity somewhere in this highly cluttered world. My physical identity demonstrates my desperate attempt to distinguish it from everyone else's. I exhaust myself trying to stick out like a sore thumb in a world full of people trying to do the exact same thing.

But it is how we connect, with our identities, and the greater effort made to discover and accept the fluidity of who we are the greater the relationships we will have. At the same time as establishing our own identity we search for those who can help us understand it. We search for those who share little bits of our sense of being so that eventually we do not end up as solitary islands in our own sea of thoughts but as a connected body with an answer for all our quirks somewhere in the world.

Identity is vital and if you are lucky enough to have settled and established an identity that provides a sense of security and togetherness then bask in the ability to feel at once unique and wholly supported in a world full of tiny islands reaching out to you as you happen to pass.

Scantily clad and totally rad.

                                                                   Source via

Slut shaming is wrong in whichever context you put it. Whether it be to class a woman as undignified based on sexual history, desires and choices or on the clothing she wears it is an unfair judgement on her way of being that really isn't reversed for the other gender. The sexual revolution has perhaps not come to its conclusion in that rather than being liberated women are merely encouraged to behave and dress provocatively but are then ridiculed and debased for doing so in some bizarre and unjust game of double standards. The media says to wear a mini skirt, and society (whilst perpetuating the content of the media) passes judgement for any woman or girl who decides that they really do like the scantily dressed fashion item. The amount of people a woman sleeps with is becoming less of a cause for discrimination because, like, get over it, but the sexualised fashion making its way down to girls as young as 12 is a little more concerning.

There is a more psychological issue running right along side our slut shaming scandal which brings to light the reasons behind the fashion choices women and girls make. A young girl is the only person making the conscious choice to wear a revealing crop top and hot pants which is totally rad if that makes her comfortable but, when looking at it a different way, a horrible example of the mass insecurity supplied by media and society both to sexualise girls in particular.

For some reason, most boys do not feel it necessary to wear as little as possible to parties where they will find a majority of the girls with skirts riding just below their buttocks. Sexuality for boys, whilst full of its own concerns, is not quite as dramatically enforced as sexuality for girls is shoved into the faces of TV watchers, newspaper readers and internet users every single day. The power of female sexuality may have something to do with femininity and the mystic hold it seems to have over both the possessor and the onlooker and when one is comfortable with said sexuality a short skirt and an attractive demeanour can be totally killer. But the horrible feeling I have when I see a young girl clad in nothing but a bralet and short skirt is that this girl is not really meaning for the whole world to be watching as the skirt rides up, or her cleavage squeezes as the bralet bunches together. Sometimes I worry that this girl has seen one too many popular music videos and suffers from low self esteem because glossy magazines scream at her to lose weight and get a tan and get toned and wax everywhere possible. So this girl wears near to nothing to feel the gaze of men (and women) on her, to know that some men will look at her hungrily and to feel appreciated for the perfectly formed body which each day is devalued and criticised for not looking inhuman, all to fill a hole in her confidence. This girl is probably only 14.

This is not to say that wearing provocative clothing is always a sad thing. Sometimes it's thrilling to wear short shorts, sometimes it feels empowering and pleasant to know that you are attractive to people in the immediate vicinity and sometimes being scantily clad is a choice of a self confident woman who enjoys the attention just for the rush it gives her.

What is desperately important to stress is that in both circumstances a woman cannot be called a slut for wearing revealing clothing. It means nothing in the way of describing who they are, but it is detrimental all the same. There is no need for a public ban on hot pants (I for one would heartily oppose such a thing) but there is definitely a need for a review on how women are portrayed. Sexualisation by itself is not wrong but sexualisation forced onto all members of society, including young children, in a visually violent and often distasteful manner through a vast section of media causing a whole wave of self hate and misplaced respect is almost disgusting.

Flow like water. Dance, dance, dance.

(source: bohemianswift via: humorking)

Life can be exhilarating. Surprisingly, the short bursts of exhilaration in betwixt monotonous and droning existence do not always come from adrenaline inducing activities or momentous occasions but from the buzzing of a brain that has long sat waiting in a kind of stupor as life was passing by.

Like electricity shooting through your veins life can sometimes randomly give you a natural high, a short lived but wonderful whirring experience of cluttered fast thinking and a sharp sting to a heart that has been living untouched and simply beating in hibernation. The sharp sting is not one of pain, but one of exhilarating enthusiasm pulsing energy into limbs and thoughts and senses. Suddenly, from what was seeming a dull reality comes from nowhere a speeding rush of feeling. The art and love around you you were trying desperately to cling to and make something of is now inspiring and fires ideas and passions into your heart and head in a flurry of activity. You want to do, you want to be. You have to use up the energy you can feel humming in your hands, sticky and heavy like clay you have a weighted desire to be busy with life.

But nothing makes sense. No words are actually going to come to your brain yet, it's too excited by this rush, this force. The awful thing about this is that you mustn't grab onto the feeling, for the exhilaration will slip through your fingers like sand and leave you feeling hollow with the effort of making it mean something. And so you have to close your eyes and dance or walk and play your music so loud you'll probably suffer from Tinnitus in years to come because this energy does mean something but you're going to have to let it flow. Let it flow and when it subsides into a glowing, faint smile left on your face then sit down and write or do whatever it was your brain was desperately needing to do. Write about how it felt, write down the ideas that came to you, and start to express what is so vital to your being.

You can lose what it is that beats in your heart every day in a small moment, but if you wait long enough it will come to you like some bizarre dream that imprints faintly onto your memory for the rest of the day. Life is exhilarating, so flow like water and dance your way through it towards the something brilliant that has been pulling you along the path.