Black Sheep

I have an odd thing against fads. In fact, I can be so stubborn that I’ll refuse to listen/read/do certain things when it seems everyone is following a fad. I still haven’t read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code because I didn’t like how everyone was gushing over it. My friends in high school kept saying I “had to” read this book. I didn’t like that. It took me 7 years before I watched the Titanic movie. I used to think those Affliction shirts were cool when I saw MMA fighters wearing them, but I don’t like how it seems every tool in the lower mainland is now wearing them. I’m not sure why I don’t like fads. I just don’t like following what everyone else is doing.

I wasn’t always this way. I have this stubborn tendency to be the black sheep in the herd but I can’t pinpoint when this started. I’m not sure if it is my innate personality, but I have a feeling it was passed from my Dad and Stepmum. I always heard things like “Why would you want to be normal?” or “Normal is boring. Be different” or “Stop thinking what others are thinking and do what you want.” For a while I used to be quite frustrated with my parents for always being so different from my friends’ parents. For a start, why on earth did we have to move so much? Ever since an early age, I was never in the same school for more than a year before we jumped to a different city and/or country. I started thinking we more closely resembled a pack of Gypsies than a normal family. I longed for normality, consistency, monotony, suburbia, pop tarts, junk food, white bread, brand name clothes, MTV, and Nintendo. Instead, I was told POP tarts weren’t real food; if I were to eat instant noodles, I’d have to replace the brain cancer seasoning packets with soy sauce; if I was hungry then have some fruit; MTV was trash; video games thwart creativity; if I was bored then read a book; wearing Nike meant supporting child labour. Needless to say, I only ate brown bread, brown rice, absolutely no junk food, and having a soda was considered a treat. The idea of entertainment was considered listening to music and drawing in my room. Going out to a restaurant for dinner was unheard of. Watching TV while eating dinner was out of the question. If I ever got into trouble, my parents never ‘grounded’ me because they considered it a useless form of punishment. Instead, they just gave me more chores to do. I was always ashamed as a kid for not being ‘normal’ or not fitting in with the rest. I was very self conscious of the fact I never wore the ‘cool’ clothes other kids wore. Maybe the instability of continuously moving to new places and never knowing how long it would be until the next move made me long for what I saw as comfort, safety, predictability and consistency in other kids’ families.

I’m rambling. 

What am I getting at here? Hmm… I’m lost… I started out explaining why as a kid I always wanted to fit in but ended up rambling on about my insignificant childhood. I guess I should just finish this train of thought by saying that in recent years, despite my former tendency to conform and seek acceptance, I now catch myself saying or thinking things I heard my parents say to me when I was younger. I guess their years of unconventional parenting somehow got through to me. I now find myself reluctant to wear what everyone else is wearing, avoid wearing brand names for the sake of showing off the brand name itself, wary of books that everyone says I must read, and hesitant of doing something just because everyone else is doing it. I hope I don’t come across as a pretentious snob, which I’m sure I do. I hope that sharing my childhood experiences made sense of some of my disdain for fads. But if it didn’t, I’m not surprised, because even I can’t make sense of my childhood.