I like to listen to the Ben Folds song "Live With What You Are"-- the chorus is "There's never gonna be a moment of truth for you/while the world is watching/All you need is the thing you've forgotten/And that's to learn to live with what you are." It helps when I'm in my more dramatic/justicey moods to bring me back to a more grounded outlook.
However, sometimes a person does get hir moment of truth. You can't live expecting yours to come, but I think it's nice, heartwarming, etc, to see and appreciate others'. Today Fillyjonk
posted about a UK woman named Susan Boyle who got her moment and then some on the show "Britain's Got Talent." It couldn't have been an easy road-- as Fillyjonk says:
She’s over 40, she’s ungroomed, she’s on the fat side, and her accent denotes low class. As it turns out, she also has learning disabilities and has never been on a date. She flies in the face of what we expect out of a performer and what we, as a culture, esteem in a woman.
So the judges (how would we know what to value if Simon Cowell didn't exist?!) do their best snobby snark routines, and even the narration sets up the audience to look down their noses at her. And then? Well, watch
the clip (embedding disabled, but really, seriously, click, it's worth it).
Blub and blub some more. Fillyjonk's post (linked above) is also definitely worth a read, as she's a much better writer (and philosopher) than I am. I really liked what she wrote. Aw, who am I kidding, I'm just going to have to post a big quote for posterity.
Folks, we are all Susan Boyle. Fat or thin, pretty or plain, butch or femme, old or young, abled or not: people will judge us and find us wanting. You can posture all you want, out of genuine confidence or bravado; you can insist that the ideals are wrong, that the goalposts need to be moved, that rational humans can shake off the shackles of cultural expectation. You can talk big and wiggle your hips — for some people, that’ll just make you more of a joke.
What makes people stop laughing — or at least, what makes you stop caring if they do? The discovery that something about you is utterly remarkable. Because it is. It might not be an angelic voice or some other showy talent. It might be humble, even difficult for others to notice. You might not know what it is yet (lord knows I don’t). You don’t even have to realize, right off the bat, how your remarkable qualities elevate you past any backwards beliefs about who you should be or what you should look like.... It’s an arduous process and goodness knows we’ve never said otherwise. But whatever it is, once you really know it’s there, once you know how much that means, a smirk from Simon won’t change a damn thing — and you’ll slap that smile off his face when you bust it out.
So I don't know. I may never have my moment of truth while the world is watching, the way Susan Boyle did. In fact, I probably won't. But some mere facts of my existence-- I mean, the fact that you people are in my life and reading this right now!-- are moments enough.
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