Your Own Beat
On the modern weight of being constantly watched — and the courage it still takes to march to your own beat.
Somewhere along the way, the audience moved inside our heads. We carry it around all day — the imagined room of strangers ready to weigh in on every move. This poem started as an honest count of how much that weight had been costing me.
Many fears stem from today’s society
But who wrote these rules?
Why can’t we simply be?
Why are we afraid of these fools?
I remember as a child — we had less filter
We’re in the age of information
And maybe it’s just me — but things felt simpler
Now we cast judgment and damnation
We can learn anything we want
Yet we happily take the role of sheep
Mindless in how we form “opinions”
I can’t remember my last good night’s sleep
What if I liked the wrong Tweet?
What will someone I don’t know think?
What happened to marching to your own beat?
We need to be careful of what we think
The fear of being judged for liking the wrong thing isn’t new — but the surface area is. Every preference now has an audience. Every move can be archived. You can feel yourself flinching before the thought is even finished forming.
Marching to your own beat used to be a metaphor. Now it’s a discipline. The discipline of remembering that the imagined room of strangers in your head is not, in fact, the room you actually live in.
— JTC