Why Snobbery Almost Killed Me and Silenced My Voice

This is a short follow-up to my last post. If you haven’t already, you can read it here: The Cost of Erasing Yourself Out of Guilt and Fear.

I wrote that last post from a place of anger—at having my voice suppressed, at restraining myself, and at allowing people to take advantage of my meekness for their own sense of superiority.

I do not wish to hear from them anymore.

Any time I wanted to do something independently, their repeated frantic responses were something along the lines of, “If you do things your way, you’re going to fail and get punished.” This is one significant reason why cutting them off and deleting every social media channel was the right call.

I’m tired of being inauthentic. I’m tired of having a dictating gatekeeper (who is actually way more fragile in the real world) control what I’m supposed to want and not want.

Now let me be clear about one thing—I am not against having an elite, extrovert lifestyle if that is what works for you. I am not stopping you.

I can’t stand domineering extroverts who constantly see others as needing to be fixed and want to meddle all the time and force them to change their lifestyle, ignoring that maybe internally they don’t have a desire for it?

I despised having their elitist ideals imposed upon me as if my natural choices and internal value system were inferior. And if you couple that with a domineering personality, that’s unforgivable and anybody who does this to me will be cut off from my life.

I’d forgiven my dad but not this person (and I never will forgive)—and if you know me, that’s saying a lot.

I’ve become increasingly intolerant of people who feel the need to save me. Mainly with my creative path but an extension of that is lifestyle choices.

I am more on the ascetic side than the hedonist side.

There is a way to pursue joy and create a beautiful life on your own terms without needing a whole lifestyle to perform for validation, and I despise people who pity me and think I’m depriving myself if I don’t want big city vacations, don’t want to wear corporate clothes (because in my daily life, I don’t need to), and I don’t want a materialistic extroverted lifestyle that involves a lot of catering to and sacrificing my schedule for people with so much going on (bachelorette parties, weddings, brunches, etc.).

For me, being a hermit means I have fewer chances of someone else dictating my choices.

I only want friends who are earnest and also are capable of enjoying things like movies, music, random dancing, silly storytelling, and theme park trips. I want to feel relaxed and not stiff around them.

I can’t stand people who are so stuck up that they won’t let themselves enjoy anything because they have an image to maintain or that it’s “not the correct thing that gives external validation.”

I hate that stagnancy—in their view—means “not wanting excessive external stimulation” and “not wanting the elite sophisticated lifestyle.” They are stagnant for waiting forever for validation and depending on external things—and also imposing that stagnation on me.

If you need approval to get moving with your life, you are the stagnant one. Gosh, I don’t know if you can tell, but they really were suffocating me, and I had every right to revolt against their emotional dictatorship.

I am tired of gossip and people who try to fish out gossip from me because they’re so empty—just so they can hurt me later if I dared to choose my own peace and autonomy.

I especially hate it when someone forces me to read things that aren’t relevant to my interests.

And that’s saying something because I will voluntarily read broadly and gain inspiration from disparate sources in multiple genres—so don’t tell me I’m incapable of feeding my brain. I just prefer books and videos over lengthy articles that lecture me on what to think or boring, didactic stuff from snobs. I am someone who contains multitudes. I love historical fiction as much as military sci-fi. I love prairie books as much as medieval fantasy. I love fairy tales as much as streams-of-consciousness narratives. I love cozy children’s literature as much as philosophical novels about suffering.

In school, I was equally competent at all subjects (I once got 100% on an AP World History test even when the class average was 50%). I have a knack for tapping into the collective unconsciousness intuitively (which is something they lack because of their need to control and critique and needing to be correct in front of others).

I can generate multi-genre, cinematic plot ideas on the fly (so much that I don’t know what to do with all those ideas and fear I may not even get to them all). Whereas the person judging me for not being sophisticated is joyless and petty and won’t do anything to move forward if it means failing to impress the elites. Everything for them has to have intellectual aesthetics (anything else outside of that, even with power and conviction, is evaluated as inferior and not worth learning from) and it’s that sort of disdain that I hate the most.

It’s also insane that they don’t recognize Hayao Miyazaki’s genius either or appreciate musicians like Johnny Cash, who are both very deep individuals. It made me livid when they insinuated that me liking Juliet Marillier is akin to liking Sarah J. Maas when you need a very high attention span and love for rich folklore and myths—and most of all, an unpretentious and mystical soul—to appreciate Juliet Marillier. Juliet Marillier is on a much higher league than Sarah J. Maas.

They were unwilling to see depth and be in awe of the strong spirit and the powerful life force of my favorite creators of all time. My favorites lack performative, elite aesthetics—so in their view, my taste is inferior to theirs, and they have to lecture me about it.

They had the nerve to insinuate that my eyes were vacant, when in real life, people notice the dual energies in my eyes—sharp and intense yet childlike and soft. Most people do not hold those two expressions simultaneously, which means my inner soul has a lot of vitality and it manifests itself in the paradox that appears in my gaze.

I have main character energy.

I kowtow to no one and despise that I have to and I never use people as props or tools because I want everybody to have internal agency—and that commands respect and awe.

This person, in contrast, hides behind intellectual aesthetics and borrows an identity to look good.

How am I the cruel one when I want others to have autonomy (and I leave them alone) while they lashed out at anybody who wanted to live outside of their control and made decisions without consulting them first?

How am I the socially deficient one when they needed me to look amiable, but their presence next to me would make every acquaintance I know feel uncomfortable?

How am I the less imaginative one and the less strong-willed one when they were constantly seeking validation and structure from the elites? As if they were operating from a checklist and dismissed excellent media that the elites did not validate?

How am I the insincere one when they were always scheming in an opportunistic way and wanted to use people for opportunities?

How am I the crisis when they were constantly frantic and kept scolding me if I showed any hint of not wanting to be their social prop anymore? If I wanted a life outside of their influence and surveillance?

How am I the brain dead one if I had to shut myself down to prevent them from scolding me—if they caused this state of shutting down in the first place?

I can’t take any creative advice seriously from them if they can’t feel any sense of awe for anything outside of their prescribed hierarchical system of evaluation. If they feel either numb or disdain in reaction to things that can be great outside of prestige, then I should not be kowtowing to them or letting them continue to lecture me and scold me about what imagination or once-in-a-lifetime originality is supposed to be. If The Chronicles of Narnia doesn’t make you shed tears and if you feel no sense of yearning for eternity after reading it, you have a dead soul.

They were so snobby that my abstract intuition was a lesser form of intelligence, and that abandoning it in favor of their rigidity and prescribed hierarchical system was true intelligence.

They were so snobby that “things that just clicked” in many of my works (hitting the nail on the head with something greater than myself) needed credentials for my skills to be valid. Even if I got many things right unconsciously and without the rules, they insisted that I was sorely lacking and needed their lectures.

I lacked individuality because I wanted sovereignty. Their individuality depended on their lack of sovereignty.

I was unsophisticated because I could not be authentic with their scolding. They were sophisticated because they scolded me.

I was not well-read or clever because I took to heart books about grim realities. They were well-read and clever because they complained about books that exposed life-or-death kind of suffering.

My inner world was “lifeless” because it was not externally validated. Their inner world needed external validation to even exist.

They told me I’d be nothing without rich friends or prestige. If they had no rich friends or prestige, they’d be nothing.

Why does borrowing an identity from a group of people make you more individualistic?

They made me want to quit writing and said I wasn’t good enough for my dream unless I did exactly what they said—when there are countless examples of people who are similar to me who have succeeded. I’m not taking advice from someone who repeatedly policed what I’m allowed to be authentic about because they’re terrified of losing their compliant social prop (who was me) and that their limiting beliefs could not terrorize me for the rest of my life.

There was period of time when I didn’t want to produce anymore because they were lecturing me, constantly nitpicking my vibes, insinuating that my entire self needed to be fixed, and insisting that I needed to appeal to elitists and prestigious people because my core self was defective and inferior. They’re also the type of person to complain about roots music and anything simple but nostalgic.

So after the drought had been long enough, they were exasperated (their tone was equivalent to them grabbing me aggressively by the shoulders and shaking me and saying, “I can’t figure out what’s wrong with you”).

Well they were the ones who caused the drought in the first place and made me extremely demoralized because they were frantic about me not being what they wanted to be. The compliant prop who was smart enough to brag about but not powerful enough to challenge them.

So I’m damned if I try to produce but damned if I don’t. This is a textbook example of a double bind they imposed and enforced ruthlessly—their hunger for control over my writing career caused me to become so paralyzed because I’ll be punished whether I write or take an extended break. I was an ongoing crisis and clusterfuck that needed their severe intervention. When it really wasn’t necessary because they were forcing me to be what I didn’t even want to be because I was not allowed to be an autonomous individual—anything independent and authentic would reflect badly on them and sabotage their need to impress the elites.

That double bind was sadistic. They blamed me for the problem they psychologically engineered to make me weaker, demoralized, and too full of doubt to wrestle myself from their death grip. Muzzling my sincerity and then blaming me for being insincere.

If my soul died, that would make it easier for them to lord over me and claim that it was my own stupidity that killed me—even when they inflicted the damage that caused me to wither away and lose my spirit.

This person held a grudge against introverts who wouldn’t put up with their ego or sacrifice their lives for them (to the point where they wanted certain introverts to suffer). They never saw that their domineering ways repelled introverts and that it isn’t introversion’s problem but the shaming and scolding?

I bet if you set a timer and forced both of us to generate fantasy story prompts, my list would be longer and more imaginative than theirs because their elitism, disdain, and utter lack of childlike wonder makes them less imaginative and more stilted.

So don’t you dare think that just because I’m not an elite that I am incapable and should automatically quit writing. I’ve had enough of people who say I should give up on myself (that caused me to waste my 20s).

I need to build new reputation—that I am a formidable opponent with raptor teeth and blue fire in my blood and wings on my feet—and you should not mess with me or assert your superiority over me, especially if you don’t have the roots or the rich inner world or the grit to back yourself up.

My meekness has cost me my voice, so it’s time to fight for myself. My mother lived her entire life being meek and it led to her early death. So in a dream after her death, I heard her warning me that if I did not make a radical change, I’d suffer from the same fate.

People like me don’t deserve to waste away, and I felt they wanted me to distrust my voice so much that I was powerless to choose anything outside of their narrow view of what the correct way to create is.

I felt like this person would rather have me waste away, rotting as their meek and timid subordinate that they have to scold all the time, than succeed on my own terms because my potential victory would prove just how irrelevant their sense of superiority was. I have zero regrets cutting off contact with this frantic person who needed to enforce surveillance and turn me into a project to fix to feel important.

There is no correct way to rise. Anyone who says otherwise is terrified of you proving them wrong and rising without needing their rules.

I know that people out there who are similar to me have succeeded against all odds. And I don’t care about prestige and don’t appreciate being forced to care about it. External status (or lack thereof) has no bearing upon internal capacity, fortitude, or a singular voice that will outlast generations. They made me feel I’d be helpless, unimaginative, and utterly devoid of depth without kowtowing the social circle they wanted me to cozy up to for their future opportunistic goals to boost their frantic ego that needs to siphon other people’s energy—they lack the intuitive soul and internal fortitude that I have an abundance of.

If they truly were sophisticated and complex about existential philosophy, they would not view my sovereignty, my abstract intuition, my yearning for solitude, and my rugged outlaw ways as threats—they wouldn’t scold me for those. A true life philosopher would be on board with it and allow me to embrace it, regardless of external status, credentials, or social polish. It was super insane that they thought anybody who loved solitude was unimaginative and brain dead.

If they needed the validation of a group and if their identity was all about performance and signaling correctness, then they were not a true proponent of individuality. In fact, they wanted me not to be my own individual because my intuition would prove that their intellectual posturing was just a coverup of their hollowness and inability to feel any joy and generate inner power.

I just need some time to nurture my abilities and gifts (especially after having them suppressed for so long).

They wrote for prestige and to lord their cleverness over others and to feel validated. They wanted me to be a copy of them but a lesser copy.

I write for vindication so that I may reach sacred heights and navigate hidden labyrinths.

Let’s see who has a true identity forged in the heart’s furnace when you remove all external markers of status.

Let’s see whose soul is equipped to pull out the sacred blade from the stone of time.

Let’s see who can run the farthest through rugged terrain and not grow weary.

Let’s see who can fly like an eagle in the eye of a storm.

Let’s see who savors the depths of still waters and who mocks the waters for being so still.

If today is any indication of the years to come, the answer speaks for itself.