One Girl’s Uncommon Thinking
I can’t quite place a finger on the moment I knew my thoughts differed from others.
maybe it was from when I refused to wear the floral spaghetti strap and colorful halter neck dresses my mother bought for me.
My refusal was met with a look of dismay and anger while I simply thought that I didn’t want my back and shoulders exposed to everyone.
Or was it from the time I sat by myself in class while the other girls huddled together in bathrooms in the guise of keeping each other company.
While I was only 8 or 9 years old at the time, it didn’t make sense to me why I should follow someone else to the bathroom when I didn’t feel like peeing.
Was the bathroom for peeing or for fellowship?
Lo and behold it, it turned out that those who communed in the bathroom also ate together during lunch and played the same kind of plays in the playground, so when I chose to join at the point of the playground, I had already become an outsider.
Or was it in secondary school when I wouldn’t smile at the teasing of boys nor allow a nearby classmate look into my assignment or assessment’s script, how did my eyes look when I said no? like the strict house master or an antisocial weird girl?
Antisocial! I had heard that word too many times growing up, my Dad got me self help books and Celine Dion and spice girls CDs to spice up my life.
It did spice up my life, I knew those songs when girls copied them out from song books but even then i wasn’t exactly part of the clique because I didn’t know about Destiny’s child and Ja rule and Nigerian Afro beat artists. The songs I knew were too soft, too demure.
So how didn’t I become a demure chick? I should have learned from the likes of Posh more popularly known as Victoria Beckham, how to be ladylike and pretty, but up until university I was none the wiser. One senior student had sincerely urged me to try to be more to be ladylike.
I’m still trying till date.
The most amazing thing is I somehow became a regular adult, I got accepted into organizations, worked with people, I learned to blend in or so I thought.
On ‘many rare’ occasions, I could be caught looking lost while everyone was laughing at a joke a superior had told.
While I looked forward to someone explaining the joke, I never got an answer because the joke wasn’t funny in the first place, I was still far behind in the grand sphere of boot licking.
In various scenarios like these, I have always had my reasons for being different, sometimes though I didn’t have a reason to refuse, I just didn’t want to go along.
While it is good to think about things and understand your why, it is incredibly liberating to also know that you don’t owe everyone a why.
In the few times I have followed the crowd to avoid being an oddball, I’ve never had a good time and have found that, although I was with a lot of people, I was still alone.
At some point in time I had discovered that I was too serious for my peers and while I could vibe with a generation older than me, they did not tolerate any attempts to challenge their ways of thinking.
My problem with the older generation is not that they were wrong, I just often saw more than one way to think of a matter or handle a situation.
There are many other examples I have not worked out the courage to share nor can I find the right words at the moment to explain.
This matter of people being different than I am has being going on for a while.
While how I think is not uncommon, it appears 1 + 1 = 2 is true only in the mathematics textbooks.
The thing is, I haven’t chosen to go against the norm, I’ve just chosen to think a bit more, maybe the story will change in the future. Maybe people will miraculously admit that they are the different ones some day.
Recently, I’ve had to take a step back and just walk at my pace, not hurriedly, I am not trying to catch up and not too slow, I’m not sure anyone is trying to catch up with me, who should walk with you will walk with you.
What’s that song again?
“If it’s meant to be, it will be, it will be, baby just let it be”
