“You are Bob” = “Your name is Robert Smith. You were born 35 years ago in Alabama, and you were 25 before you ever met someone from outside the state. When you were in high school, you heard a genre of music you friends didn’t listen to, for the first time. You liked it. When you tried to share it with your friends, they beat you up. When you were a kid, you didn’t really like football all that much, but social norms say you’re not valid if you don’t like football. So you forced yourself to pretend you like it. Your friends still bring up that “crazy Chinese song” you showed them that one time 20 years ago, and make fun of it, adding more and more racist caricatures about Chinese people to the story year after year (when the song was actually Korean).

You know you can’t leave Alabama, because no one from your town can. Everyone believes this, believes they’re better off staying, believes that anyone who wants to leave is crazy, a traitor. Your parents wouldn’t let you go to college. You ended up following in the same sort of aimless jobs they did their whole lives. Nothing around you excites you — not like the videos you watch online, in secret. If anyone knew about them, you’d never be able to show your face outside again. Society teaches you to be ashamed of sex, though your male friends are always sharing sexual videos and saying abusive things about women, and their wives are forced to put up with it, because their mothers told them that the only alternative is to be single, and that’s the worst thing ever. But your videos aren’t even sexual, so why are you ashamed? They’re just different types of music that your friends don’t understand. Places in the world that you can’t travel to, because you’re stuck in Alabama. Documentaries about interesting things that happened in history, in distant parts of the world. Why is it wrong to like these? Why should they hurt you for it?

You don’t know why. You just know that they will.

You just know that it’s wrong for Bob from Alabama to want to travel to Poland or Peru. You know that it’s wrong for Bob from Alabama to like music from Korea or Romania. You know that it’s wrong to want to wear colors besides grey. You know that it’s wrong to not want to watch football. It’s wrong to drink wine instead of beer, or to not drink at all.

All of these things that don’t seem wrong… well, they aren’t wrong objectively. They’re just wrong for you because you were born as Bob in Alabama.

And you’ve been taught by your town all along that these things are not for you.”

“Well, I’m actually not Bob from Alabama” is one attempt at breaking free from those limits.

And it’s not necessarily a bad one.

Moving to another city and changing your name, and lying about where you’re from does not necessarily mean perjuring yourself if it comes to that.

(See also — about a billion crime dramas where the red herring is the smooth, well-set, probably mafia-tied businessman whose lies have nothing to do with the crime at hand — what he’s really trying to hide is that until two years ago, he was Bob from Alabama.)

Making an online persona where you can live a different life is also not a bad outlet, though it doesn’t solve the real issue.

The real issue is that it is okay for that person to want to do those things, no matter where they were born.

And obviously, that’s a mild example.