on being just the same as everybody else

I want to know-- what's the problem in blending in sometimes?

I've been stewing over a lot of thoughts lately because it feels to me like I've been bombarded with inspirational quotes lately to be unique! be yourself! Don't be afraid to be a unicorn! Always with these kinds of photos to draw your attention to something special and different.

This makes zero sense to me.

The most exhausting to me has been the unicorn metaphor. It keeps popping up here and there, had a stint on Glee (network television's indulgent celebration of diversity and all things different), and it's driving me crazy. Unicorns, first of all, don't exist. They don't. Humans exist, and weird humans exist, and weird humans with weird differences from other humans exist, but unicorns are not a thing.

It's just that sometimes I feel like we don't really have the right to be the same.

I think so frequently in a quest to embrace and accept ourselves and each other, we start to focus too greatly on the fact that we are, in the end, all the same. We are human. We share life experience. We celebrate, we grieve, we have frustrations, we have foibles. We are not different. We are common. The specifics are all unique, but ultimately we are the same. I don't think that's bad.

Of course, for just as many mantras to be a unicorn, there are as many reminders that we are the same. We all deserve the same civil rights. We all deserve access to healthcare. We all deserve to love other humans. We deserve the right to individual expression.

So tell me-- if we all deserve these things (and others), why must it be so dreadfully and socially unacceptable to want just kind of normal things and to aspire to be kind of a nice, normal person?

Take, for example, Shanna, my favorite contestant from the most recent season of The Glee Project.

Now I know what you're thinking, and you're right. I hate Glee. Why would I watch a competition show where the whole point is to become the next Glee co-star? Because it's the greatest competition show ever, of course. Watch it and try to disagree with me.

Shanna has an INCREDIBLE voice and, from all accounts on the show, was incredibly easy to work with. She rarely had critiques and was consistently asked to do hard things-- you know, like wear a meat dress a la Lady Gaga for ten hours on a video shoot. No biggie, right? She was eliminated  ultimately because she is normal.

When asked what kind of character she saw herself playing on Glee, she said she'd be "the athletic girl who can sing and joins everything." Apparently this wasn't a clear enough identity and GOOD BYE SHANNA.

This following Nellie, another wonderfully normal girl with a killer voice, who I found incredibly relatable exactly because she was so aware of who she is as herself-- which is not the sex kitten they tried over and over and over to force her to become, and when she crippled under the discomfort of that veneer, GOOD BYE NELLIE.

(Interestingly, in the final episode when all the contestants returned to be in the final music video, the editing of the show was such that Nellie and Shanna were conspicuously deflected.)

And if we're being honest, the show's winner Blake almost didn't win because he wasn't definable as anything but the nice, good-looking jock. In other words, he didn't have a gimmick that was interesting enough because the appeal of Glee is the vulnerability of people with quirks and differences worthy of being slushied. If I'm reading into the semantics correctly here, normal people apaprently aren't vulnerable.

What's interesting is that, while I recognize and have learned to celebrate my own unique qualities, the basic reality is that I am one of those Normals. I'm an average-sized girl of average height with naturally average brown hair. I fit social "norms" in that I'm attracted to men and I'm politically moderate. I have a wide range of interests and, while I'm pretty good at some things, am not necessarily a freakishly talented person. I have a lot of friends in a lot of different circles and don't especially identify with any one particular group or institution. In my own way, I am the girl who can sing and joins everything. And as a result, just like Shanna, many times, I am just not special enough to get the role, get the job, or find the right pants in my size.

I feel like that's majorly wrong. I feel like we're beginning to compare traits and characteristics that are incomparable, yet we become defensive about our weirdness and that my weirdness is so much weirder (read: better) than your weirdness. I deserve more attention than you for my extra weird weirdness. Only weird people need to be represented on TV because there isn't enough of this teeny tiny specific demographic represented in our popular culture. Forget about the fact that it actually might be kind of weird to be normal because normal is normal, not weird.

The truth is, I don't feel particularly represented in popular culture. "Normal" women on television (since I'm running with the Glee thing) are represented by characters like Grace on Will & Grace (gorgeous redhead who is eating all the time but remains thin and apparently has bad hygiene?), Liz Lemon on 30 Rock (head writer and producer of a successful comedy show who also eats all the time but remains thin and apparently has bad hygiene) and Jess on New Girl ("adorkable," gorgeous woman with a beautifully "unstylish" wardrobe who is also thin [can't say whether she eats all the time because I stopped watching]). So even the "normal" women on television aren't actually normal. None of them are below a size 6 (though they try to pass off Tina Fey as at least a size 8-- I'm NOT buying it) and i guess in order to be normal I'm not supposed to cut my toenails? I'm sorry to tell you, but not cutting your toenails is ACTUALLY weird, and also gross.

In discussing this topic with some friends recently, someone posed the question, "But would you watch a show about someone normal?"

Duh, I would-- which is why I'm excited for The Mindy Project this fall because while all signs point to this being a show about a smarter, Indian Jess from New Girl, at least she's a size 8 or 10 AND THAT IS TOTALLY NORMAL!

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't want to be a unicorn. I don't want all my friends to be unicorns. I want us to be nice pretty horses who all run around together and eat carrots, and some of the horses can be unicorns, and some can be zebras, and some can be very small, and some can pull plows, and some can be the fastest racehorse of all time, but at the end of the day: we're all horses.

At the end of the day: we're all humans. We're all the same.

Let's try to concentrate a little harder on that.