|| P O R C E L A I N ||

It's been almost a year and a half since I journeyed into teaching. While I think I have had more than enough complaints posted here on this blog, I realized there is another issue that caught my eye. It is the concept of "porcelain"-- something structured, beautiful, yet fragile. "Porcelain" comes from the idea that something is intentionally structured to look, feel, sound, and act perfectly. "Porcelain" refers to the incessant cries for a certain level of perfection in people that, like porcelain, shatters once broken.

It is this kind of structured falsity that I want to address.

Very often I see my students and colleagues living the lie that unless they act a certain way or carry themselves in a certain air, they will never be good enough. They prefer to hide under a mask of convenience rather expressing their feelings in a raw manner. They prefer structured falsity-- rehearsed smiles and lines of "I'm okay" to shut out the desperate "Help me's" from within.

They scream, yet they silence themselves. They shriek, yet they are lulled.

The sheer iron curtain which separates appearance from reality looms like hovering rain. Appearance, in this sense, pertains to the notion of having everything put together, and reality refers to the hard truth of witnessing everything slowly falling out of place. The pain here is not found in waking up one morning and finding everything in shambles. Rather, the pain is found when one can do nothing but watch as everything slowly unravels into meaningless nothings. As "porcelain" shatters slowly, each crack has a different, particular strike that contributes to the "porcelain's" inevitable ruin.

I do not intend, however, to disregard a certain aspect of social etiquette that frowns on bestial manners of expressing oneself. I do see the value in controlling oneself so as to avoid countless hysterical and passive-aggressive acts of pain, want, worry, and so on. What I yearn to address by writing this article is the danger of maintaining a curated image for too long.

Very often I see a good many of my students and colleagues choosing to have a perfect yet fragile appearance rather than a stronger, longer lasting one. It works, yet it fades overtime. It hardens, yet it shatters once an outside force comes in contact with it. What I am leaning towards is a certain degree of vulnerability that comes from having a compact circle of trusted friends and mentors.

Though I am not an expert in this field of “porcelain-ity,” (if I may end up calling it that) realizing that my thoughts and observations may be insufficient, I wrote this article to express a culmination of ruminations wandering about in my mind lately. I am aware that this issue may or may not be widely talked about in other circles (the internet is a vast place), but I am merely offering my meager two-cents into this thought. “Porcelain-ity,” is a real struggle on both ends of the spectrum. Structured falsity, or another name for “porcelain-ity,” is a delicate matter that we must look into and investigate so that we could find a proper, more meaningful alternative.