I'm Just Me

Meet Alex. Alex is a boy who doesn’t believe being a boy or a girl should determine how you think; he is just Alex.

He lives near Midtown and travels over the bus network having adventures in some very unusual surrounding towns with his dog Blink, whose main aim in life is to sniff everything in the world and who dreams of being RocketDog.

At the ends of the bus lines, they meet people who live in closed towns, they are either all black or white, gay or straight, religious or atheist, rich or poor, old or young, or very differently able.

Alex can’t understand why they should live like this. He tries to get them to travel to Midtown, where they might be surprised by how people of all kinds can live together equally. Blink thinks they are all equally sniffable. If Alex is just Alex, perhaps they might realise they can just be themselves too, just equal individuals, with equally important mixtures of properties.

I’m Just Me looks at how we all tend to label people, to place them in boxes, usually because of one main property: colour, gender, sexuality, mental or physical ability, wealth, religion, politics, class or age. BUT each property is a line and we are all a dot on every one of those lines somewhere. Where all the lines cross for us, we find our own point of individuality.

If each point is equal, then WE MUST ALL BE EQUAL.

Jonny Church is a writer, artist, illustrator, architect and philosopher. He believes that we are all individuals and individuality is based upon an equal, but unique mix of different properties, such as colour, gender, sexuality, mental and physical ability, wealth, religion, politics, class and age; also that our relationships, friends, colleagues and trading partners should not be defined by existing geographical, group or community boundaries. He has written a novel and a book of illustrated verse. He loves big cities, country walks and the beach. He lives in Surrey, UK.