Flying Your Freak Flag

What drives us to be different? To try different things, to try and make ourselves stand out from the crowd. The reason that I ask this, is that as I was sitting eating lunch this afternoon, I saw two teenagers who were dressed as anime characters. Crazy hair. Weird clothes. The whole shebang. After the initial snide comments rolled through my head, I really thought about why it is that they would want to have everyone looking at them like they were freaks.
The answer I came up with, is that it’s not at all about r attention. What it’s really about is the attempt to find oneself. To discover what it is that makes you important to yourself. It helps us define our place in society. Sometimes that place is on the outside, away from the status quo.
It’s this type of courageous self discovery that has driven some of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs to build the most influential products and companies that the world has ever seen. And yet, as a society, we seek to crush this journey if discovery into a mold. We want people to turn out how we think they should be versus how they were meant to be.
I think that it’s time that we change this idea. Let people be who they are. Be who ore meant to be. Let your freak flag fly. If you think that pink hair and furry arm covers are intrinsically attached to your personality, then by all means. My point is, we should support this discovery. Figuring it who we are is a combination of failure, hard lessons, and more failure. But those tiny successes, those small bits and pieces of goals achieved and lessons learned combine to make some damn good people. Let them be interesting. Let them be themselves.