The Courage to be Cliche

File this under musings on radical love.
I’ve been thinking a lot about love and courage lately and something has struck me: sometimes I feel like my friends and I, and my generation of thoughtful feminist types more broadly, seem to conflate radical with original in a lazy, uninteresting way.
We don’t want to read the latest bestseller, listen to the latest hits, or participate in time-honored traditions for fear that it will make us seem like sheep. But in fact, this becomes it’s own form of unconscious conformity. In fact, it is sometimes radical to participate in traditions rooted in long histories, to like music that is popular and fun, to be inspired by ideas that have been inspiring a million times before. We risk adopting a hubristic attitude as if we were above some of the most basic parts of being human–having visceral reactions, wanting to belong, or, to use a cliche, following our hearts. We also risk not being part of communities for fear that we’ll lose our holey unique individuality by admitting we’re sort of just like other people.
Being too cool for school (i.e. rejecting what is popular on principle) is limiting. One can still be thoughtful and authentically participate in populist traditions. Take love, as an example. I can look at all of the courtship traditions and Hallmark cards and stupid self-help books and decide that being earnestly in love is silly. Or I can recognize some of these things as symbols of how universal and powerful love is, and reject the commercialization of that power, BUT choose to love out loud anyway–as silly, scary, and philistine as it may seem. Saying, “I love you,” is the most cliche phrase possible, and yet, it still holds a tremendous amount of power and links us with long histories of people who did what people do–fall madly in love. This exposes us to admitting some of our dependence on others, another no no in this unthinking paradigm that I have sometimes fallen prey to.
I’m tired of feeling like the measure of my feminism is how completely original I am (a byproduct of originality obsessed, albeit totally unoriginal, hipster culture?). I’m tired of hearing people pretend not to like certain music or not to have read certain books. I’m tired of seeing tradition only in terms of its mysoginistic history rather than its communal power.
In an effort to practice what I preach, I here proclaim that I have always been and will always be obsessed with Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”