It’s very regular day, you get out of your house for your daily routine for the first time. Maybe for a quick run or cycle ride. Maybe you are out on the way to your office. You come across “official” graffiti on the walls of public facilities as an official promotion as an artwork. Sometimes, preaching some social message or just some casual artwork. But in ancient Greece, when commoners didn’t have any choice to raise their voice to the elites who had all the powers to decide the futures of commoners. Graffiti came to their rescue as a medium to put out the social concerns and political rhetorics on behalf of commoners.

I think even before entering any kind of formal social structures during the evolution of humanity, we always felt the need to express ourselves. We expressed with various pictograms, we painted the walls of caves narrating stories of our daily life of a hunter-gatherer. Slowly with the evolution of society, our interactions increased and we started having dialogues. Exchanging the thoughts amongst each other, we started to create more detailed paintings describing our social activities like festival celebrations, social dances, feasts.

As we discovered our ability to speak, we quickly developed our languages and soon we got so many ways to express ourselves. We started telling stories, songs got created. We can’t even count the number of books even from a single language which is known today. We express through paintings, sculptures, dance and facial expressions. We have developed so many art forms just to satisfy our urge to express.

Still many of us lack the ability to express their thoughts in public so they turn to the diaries, journals. Those journals are their den. There are so many introverts in this world who keep expressing their thoughts for the audience in their cocoon. Sadly, many thoughts are just suppressed inside with tight lid on them. Some thoughts are not socially acceptable. For example, here in India, we have big no-no for social or public mentions of intimacies. Everyone is ready to gossip. It’s a guilty pleasure. Nobody wants to accept it publicly. This social pressure tries to put many such thoughts suppressed within. “लोग क्या कहेंगे” is the biggest worry for us Indians.

The Sad part of the story is some people couldn’t find the safety valves for their trapped emotions, thoughts and the urge to express is killed accumulating tremendous pressure within. If the consciences are strong for the person, he or she will rebel against the social norms and create something constructive with that pressure. But in many cases, this pressure cripples the person and the vicious cycle of depression starts.

The urge of expression is the soul of life and when this urge starts dying because of depression, one looses the soul. That soulless body will live the life till nature ends it or he or she takes the final step. Let’s try to help these souls, let’s take a step ahead and be more open to all thoughts. There is no harm in listening to someone. No harm in reading a book which has been created with so much effort. So just keep doing guys, express yourselves, you will be heard.

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I am participating in A to Z challenge with Blogchatter and this is my take on day 24 challenge. X is for “E(x)press yourself”. You can find my other posts from this challenge here.