what it means to larp

According to Urban Dictionary, to larp is when a person is pretending to be something or someone that they are obviously not. Such examples of people who larp are thus plenty. Some do so out of a desire to fit in, look cool or simply lie to get attention.

As someone who was not that exposed to pop culture(Western essentially) from a young age and who saw their peers talk of Justin Bieber or Alan Walker, 5th grade me was too afraid not to get exposed and get termed as the backward one. This problem was serious when we talked in a group and someone would bring up books like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson and refer something and i would just not understand anything as my parents would prefer me to rather read Ruskin Bond or Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay who are great authors nonetheless( honestly who am i to judge any writer out there?).

When i got my first smartphone hence, i immediately installed spotify and ditched the songs i already knew i loved, to listen to newer ‘cooler’ songs to make myself feel included in the conversations my peers had. Things went well and I had (still do) a half baked idea of the details of fandoms and celebrities. This is something that i feel extremely insecure about, and kinda live in a constant fear of getting exposed mid larp by my friends. Its not that i larp that much but i nod or pretend to understand stuff i probably don’t. From time to time i have said this to my friends that i may not get the full idea of whatever they are referencing to so I beg their pardon.

Furthermore with the constantly changing world and its lightning fast transitions of what is considered niche and what’s not i often get lost and am sure many others do too. I genuinely think time goes a lot faster these days and i just cannot keep track of it. Seasons change, months go by and i don’t even realise how things come to an end with each year passing by.

Derailed a bit, but the point i was about to make was something like how fast stuff is labelled as too pretentious or performative because since when was carrying tote bags or making playlists and listening to them correlate to symbols of performativeness? I know its not a sin and one can do whatever their heart wants but still it stings sometimes(okay maybe stings is too much but yeah i feel confused). If one wants to keep a curated instagram feed (feed, not fyp, idk the word used for describing my profile page, pardon) they are too fake, if someone posts whatever they want, they are messy and don’t know how to have an “aesthetic profile” etc etc.

Is it serious that i sometimes get dreams from time to time where i am au naturel and apparently that means i have a fear of getting exposed which is reflected in my subconscious? Being authentic too comes with set of labels defining my orientations ranging from sexual to political. Is it really necessary to label things up and create more cleavages in a world which is already contaminated with internalised hate and perpetually even greater hate and how much of modern identity is essentially just performance?