Strangely Familiar

Originality: A Falsehood, A Goal Or, Everything (Nothing) is Original   There’s a self-aggrandizing belief in all of us that we are original, that we can create something original. “Original” is a little arrogance we indulge ourselves. Every quip we make, face we give, and dance we release has been done before. How many times have I said something I thought was insanely clever, only to hear it uttered by several other women in the weeks after? There is an essential egotistical quality to everything we do- as though we were the first and the last, as though we have done something groundbreaking. What a shallow snorkel into the human mind tells us is that we largely know what we have been exposed to. I am able to repeat something in a particular manner (either verbatim or slightly modified) because I have seen it or heard it before. Yet part of my human egoism is that I claim it in this moment to be mine. To be new. To be brave.   There are some, in our history, who have cont