There is a point in our lives in which awkwardness reaches it’s peak and in turn develops a keen and somewhat uncomfortable awareness within our minds. We become more self-conscious and aware of our smallest faults and blunders creating our greatest critics, ourselves. As we mature into our bodies and minds we look to those around us for affirmation and when it is not received the interior makings of us that we have finally had the chance to establish begin to crumble, in which conformity is born.

It comes about in the simplest ways, involving your likes and dislikes as society that basis value off of preference and preference off of personality. My love for something that exceeds the bounds of ordinary is considered abnormal and in turn my entire being can be deemed as such. This brings about the creeping fear of exclusion, for not fitting in has been an age old tale of horror for teenage adolescence. We can see the more vocal and extreme sense of the term exclusion when witnessed with a textbook bully, someone who influences the thoughts of those around them into conformity believing that they create this written rule of what can be accepted in this particular society and what cannot. These are the initiators that build up conformity in the minds of others, what they cannot see is that by being this influence over the people they become apart of this conformist nature and in turn becomes the same as their followers, an individual that has come to comply with a system that has been established.

Conformity is a complicated matter to touch on as it is something that affects the weakest part on oneself, pursued by the fear of isolation we convince our minds to change, our actions to differ and hide away what has already been rejected. We strip our own identity to masquerade with a new, in a sense it is almost like survival but sadly the only one who receives such a negative impact is the person that chooses to detach such parts of themselves. If given enough time to live out such a farce then it soon turns into reality and what once was can never again return. Playing the role to appease is living out a life never truly your own, a life of an actor in which you give the power of judgment to your audience, rather than to yourself. This oppressiveness wreaths its way into the injured hearts of young and old, however its metamorphic outcome is over abundant in the newly developing youth. This accommodating nature implies that a personality of their own cannot exceed that of the personality of the majority and in a sense it becomes non existent.

Fears, worry, and rejection muddle the thoughts of people allowing them to open up to their criticisms of themselves much more than the encouraging nature they should provide themselves with. I am not advocating you to be that outstanding individual, the one that we encompass in godliness when they stray from the norm, in fact I am denouncing such blatant worship for that is just another form of conformity. What I am trying to do is give importance on individual thinking for even if it is clouded in misjudgement or blessed in goodness it is your own truth, if you choose to let it be truth which dissembles such a repetitive and non individualistic system. Normalcy and abnormalcy cannot be defined by something singular or affected by one action and one over the other does not mean you are enabling such customs or destroying them, what does however is your ability to create you own consciousness. Whether it be what is considered relatively average or what is looked on in disgust for its unfamiliarity the thought nonetheless is your own and no other conscious being can take that from you, only you can allow it to leave you.