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By the time I was ten, one thing had been drilled into my head, following trends and going with the crowd were bad and being different was good. My mom didn’t want me to be a cheerleader with a jock boyfriend and an eating disorder. She wanted me to be happy as myself. So, I always made sure to stay away from popular fashions at all costs. I didn’t think I was supposed to like things that everyone else liked.
My best friend, Tazja, had very similar styles to my own. Our mothers were close friends, and they raised us under very similar rules. So, naturally, she felt the same way I did about popular things. I loved going to her house for the weekend. It was so fun for us girls to gossip, play, and just hang out with her.
One weekend Tazja’s mom was talking about a big event she was going to in a couple months. Like the kids we were at the time, we got very curious about what could make an adult so excited. We pestered her about what she was talking about for an hour or so before she finally put on a video to show us what she meant. It was only a thirty-minute video, but it amazed me to no end.
The event was called Burning Man, a large Pagan festival held in the desert. I watched as the wind, speckled with sand, blew over and around the odd machines all the people had crafted. Those machines, more than anything, were what caught my attention. Most of them were designed to give an illusion of people doing different activities. A few people brought constructions of animals. There was even a bus that someone had made look like a giant cat.
I did think it a bit strange how similar some of the people looked. Everyone was dressed in odd fashions. And their hair styles and colors were like a rainbow of individuality. However, how could I help but notice that for every one person with straight brown hair, ten people had spiked green hair. I was beginning to think that is was more unique to have blonde, black, or brown hair than it was to have all sorts of unnatural looking colors and styles. It was the same with the clothes. It looked like when you were there all the unpopular things were popular. This wouldn’t have mattered, except for that I thought I wasn’t supposed to follow fads. And it was starting to look like a lot of the things I liked here, were popular somewhere else.
I wasn’t alone in my confusion. Later, when we were in her room, Tazja and I tried to discuss the whole thing. The same question was floating through our minds: If we’re supposed to be different and original, why would all those people who were so similar to us, blend together the way they did in our brains? Was it so bad for us to want to wear tight jeans or something like that if we liked it?
We assumed not because when we asked our moms about it they laughed. Only for a little bit, then they told us that we shouldn’t take things so literally. They didn’t want us to follow trends simply because they were trends, but if we like something it shouldn’t matter if other people like it or not. Later, when we thought more about it, it made perfect sense to us. We laughed at ourselves. We had been foolish to think that everything popular was bad. As stupid as we had been, I still say it was an honest mistake.
 Alatria · Tue Jan 02, 2007 @ 12:15am · 0 Comments |
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