A Bill of Rights for Normal Neurotics

For decades, I listened to people who insisted that human beings are defective and need to labor to improve themselves. This humorous manifesto stands up for the right to be imperfect.

We hold that all people are created cockeyed and are endowed with the inalienable right to be alienated, along with:

The right to be sick
The right to be uptight
The right to be toxic
The right to live in the there and then
The right to be un-clear
To be somebody else
To disown, project, introject, retroflect, genuflect, repress, and willfully to sublimate
To eat meat, sugar, fats, carbohydrates, gluten, and food additives
To turn off
To hold on, to create and maintain clutter
To be unresponsive and irresponsible
To have sticky, conflicted, unresolved, normal relationships
To be divided, disintegrated, untogether, and unwhole
To willfully construct an ego and deliberately to inhabit therein
To be closed
To rationalize and over-intellectualize
To be irrational
To be ungrounded, spaced-out, off-center, and unaware
To be low, to feel depressed, to worry, to not think positively, to complain
To generate, cultivate, and hoard karma
To open only two eyes
Not to accept oneself
Not to work it out; to maintain unresolved conflicts
Not to think it through, to stereotype, to simplify
To be armored, defensive, blocked, stuck, contactless, anxious, character-ridden, inauthentic, and paranoid
To be out of touch
To be dependent, co-dependent, overly independent, clinging, unattached, or all of these
To be manipulative, selfish, self-absorbed, uncommunicative, or their opposites
To be asleep, in the dark, unenlightened, imprisoned on the physical plane, limited, chakra-closed, and otherwise unspiritual
To be an unbeliever, infidel, agnostic, atheist, or true believer; to change beliefs; not to have beliefs; not to know what one believes; not to care what others believe
To be self-righteous, to have all the answers; to change those answers; to be consistently inconsistent
To be incompetent, inarticulate, undecided, and overwhelmed
To be embarrassed; to feel guilt and shame
To be free from other people’s categories
To fake it
To be
Or not to be
And, in all general and particular ways, to muddle through.

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A Bill of Rights for Normal Neurotics

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