WHAT ARE YOU ABOUT?

I was thinking recently, that I must be an anti-social bore to most of the people who know me. (At least those who know me on a superficial level.) I have no patience or time for most of them, not necessarily because they are bad people or bad to me or even because I have some sort of beef with them; It’s simply because I can sense what they see and what they are about, and what I see and what I’m about are soooooo totally different.

Now you could throw all kinds or arguments my way. Like, no two people are the same, or nobody is perfect (which I’ll point out s not the issue here), or you’ve got to learn to deal with all kinds of people in your life, it’s not good to isolate yourself and so on and so forth, but before you do, let me explain my point of view.

Over the years (in introspection) I’ve oscillated between cliques and being a loner. And, (this is a personal opinion) at this point in my life I find I very much prefer the latter. So this is probably just a personality thing. Still, I have personal method of gauging my relationships. It evolved from my late primary school days and through my high school and now that I think of it, it’s what I use now, and all through university.

The gist of it is this. The way I see it, there are two types of people I interact with in life. Those who add something to it and those who either don’t, or they take something out of it. Everybody has something to offer I’m sure, but in the end, whether or not certain people do you any good comes down to the individual. Because in the end, people also have different needs.

So naturally in this article I’ll speak for myself.

I’m sure we all know a bunch of them. I’ve never been the girl with friends pouring out of the woodwork. I was never bullied, and I just was always comfortable with the circles I had in my life. (Though, I realize now that that was probably a clique)I didn’t really start to see the different shades of people until I went to high school. Because that’s where everybody else’s opinion starts to matter than more than your own common sense.

Things like peer pressure, what’s cool and what’s not, whose cool and who’s not. The concept that other people could determine was ludicrous yet all of a sudden very real for me. I cared! And I hated it. I won’t go into the sordid details, but let me just say what I learnt from it.

The most important thing, (or of the most important things you could ever lean is how to be yourself and fine by yourself). You don’t need others opinions to weigh in on this knowledge, least of all when these others are the tasteless fluff that add nothing to your life.

I would sit and listen to other people talk about themselves. What they liked, what they did, what they were allowed to do, and for a while these different lifestyles became a standard that made my life that much more difficult because it was not the same for me.

But then I had to think again. So what? Why do we automatically assume that just because someone else or even a few people do something, that all of a sudden it makes them normal and you the weirdo? Why even bother with what other people say when they don’t know a thing about you? Why let them get to you when they are the ignorant losers that can’t wrap their heads around the idea that people are different. And that’s cool.

Live your life. It’s okay when you meet these people you have nothing in common with. I find that many times it’s a growing experience, especially if they are cool with themselves the way they are and they don’t need validation of any sort from other people. Their presence becomes enriching to you as a person.

But even when I meet the ones that do get all snarky, I laugh on the inside, because I know what I’m about. Do you know what you’re about?