One of my very best friends loves doing things because it makes him unique. He won’t do things because others are and will do things because others won’t.
I say that doing something because everyone else is is exactly the same thing as not doing anything because everyone else is. The “because” is identical. It is still letting others dictate what you are doing.
I remember a wonderful man I met in an Italian Market when I was about 15. I made some comment about enjoying being weird, but really everybody was weird. He said that by saying everybody was weird I was just stating how I wanted to be like everybody else.
He was right. Since I couldn’t be like everybody else I was trying to make them like me. I was doing it through a weird channel; thinking I was just more enlightened than everyone else. I knew I was weird and they were pretending they weren’t. I was delighting in being able to “be myself” while no one else was being true. Once they woke up they would realize they were like me.
I wish I could find that man again. He was one of those people who was in my life for less than ten minuets and changed it radically. It was a moment of clarity for me. If I really wanted to be myself I should wear what I want to wear. If it makes me look like I’m a conformist, so what? I should listen to the music I want or watch the movies I want. If I base my choices off how others would perceive me then they are making the choice for me. This isn’t to disregard others around me entirely. Everything has a cost and I need to be willing to pay it. Like I’m not going to upset my room mates by watching South Park downstairs. South Park is not more important that pleasant room mates. I can still enjoy it though. If someone thinks less of me, so what, I am enjoying something.
My friend says that he was teased a lot as a kid so by not doing what people want him to he is his way of being himself. I told him it was his way of identifying with a nitch social circle who were similar to him. Thus belonging.
If a group of kids decides they are going to draw a bee with yellow and black stripes, but they say that one kid can’t join them, that kid isn’t rebelling by drawing a bee with purple and white stripes to be the opposite. He is still drawing a bee. What if he wanted to draw a giraffe. Doesn’t matter though because wanting to belong over rode his or her wanting to draw. He or she felt like it was an act of defiance* but it was giving in to the need to belong.
I wasn’t every a popular child. I understand the power of a group to outcast members. How much it sucks. The need to belong. As I grew up I found places I did belong and I learned to be happy as myself. In college I did become part of the popular crowd for a segment of the population. The funny thing about that was I didn’t know that was what was happening until one day I was talking with my friend about all the graduate who had been the popular group, when we started figuring out who were the current ones we realized we were in that group.
It was when I stopped paying attention to what others wanted or were doing and just did what I wanted, or thought would be best, then everyone wanted to be around me. It was weird, this popularity. People knowing my name who I’d never met, or people coming up to me and acting as if we were good friends. I had stopped trying to have people like me or figure out what everyone else was doing. I was oblivious to a lot of it and strangely I found myself at the center.
I’m not always doing just what I want. I don’t do things I don’t want, but I own a certain brand of knife because a large group of my friends do. The knife is useful, good quality, and something that reminds me of those people. However one big reason I own that knife is so I’d feel like I fit in. I have no issue admitting that to myself. Honesty about motivation is very liberating. Multiple motivations for one action works even better.
No matter what we are told people are social creatures. Spending all our time though worrying about what people are or aren’t doing, so we can conform or not conform, judge or follow, is less time spent enjoying being alive. Unless you enjoy that sort of thing. But, again, honestly. At lest to yourself. I makes changing actions when situations change a lot easier.
*And considering we are a culture who adore the reble, it is really another form of conformity
[...] Sanity – “Fitting in by Refusing to Conform“, “Bar [...]