It Has Always Been Hard to Be Yourself
Why Does Different Bother Us?
To conform is the path of least resistance or haven’t you noticed.
Do you wanna wear a corset that requires a maid to help strap it to your body?
No?
Believe it or not, there was a time when upper class women use to hang on to the bed posts while their maids pulled as hard as they could on the corset strings. Why? Because somebody decided that a tiny waist was the gold standard of beauty. Some of these genteel women even went so far as to have a rib removed to achieve stunning results.
If they’d only had Instagram or Tik Tok back in the day. Right?
If you’re one of those misfits like me —you know, someone who marches to the beat of a different drum— then you’ve had to rebel against a lot of corsets in your lifetime. Nobody gets a free ride in any culture. Nobody. Everyone must pay to belong. Payment is pretty steep, too. A pound of flesh isn’t enough.
You’ve gotta put on the damn corset or else.
Wanna know why gay people had to hide their identities from their friends and relatives for so many god damn years? Because if they’d so much as hinted of their sexual preferences, the very people in their lives who claimed to love them the most would’ve had a cow right on the middle of the living room rug.
Moooooo!
So they did what a lot of people who hate to wear a corset do. They had a secret life and pretended to be someone that they weren’t when they’re mom walked into the room.
Fun times, right?
But guess what? Corsets weren’t held in such high regard everywhere in the world. Some cultures set the beauty bar in a different place. Maybe they bound a girl’s feet instead or put bands around their necks. Would you prefer teeny tiny feet or an extra long neck?
Never mind! You don’t get to choose. You’re stuck with the one that your culture says is the highest form of beauty.
Wanna find out what it’s like to be ostracized? Tell your family, teachers, ministers, or neighbors that you don’t plan on ever wearing a corset. Tell them that you’ve decided instead to elongate your neck.
Then RUN for the hills.
Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s explore the human need to ostracize people who don’t fit in. Shall we? When you’re a kid or even worse a teenager, if you find yourself sitting alone in the cafeteria day after day, it can do a number on your developing brain. I taught 5th grade for 22 years. There was never a year that went by without someone in every classroom ending up at the bottom of the pecking order.
No matter how hard I tried to thwart it, group dynamics played out in the most predictable fashion.
Don’t get me wrong. I structured the classroom in such a way that encouraged mutual respect, but in spite of my best efforts, people did what people always do. Yep! They established roles and filled each role with someone from the group. It was never discussed. Nobody applied for the different roles. Lo and behold, however, by the end of a few short weeks, we had a leader (usually also most popular), the followers, a class clown, a belligerent non conformist, and the one that nobody wanted to sit next to in the cafeteria.
Sound familiar?
Later, I became a principal of a large elementary school and I noticed something very peculiar at a teacher’s meeting. These same roles seemed to exist amongst my staff members as well.
Could this be the predictable behaviors of group dynamics?
It’s been understood for some time now that group dynamics can lead otherwise sensible individuals to make or agree to decisions that they might not come to on their own.
The effects can be positive, but often the dynamics of a group have very negative consequences.
There have been numerous studies conducted over the years attempting to define the limits to which humans will go to obey, conform, or belong to a designated group. Some of these experiments remain controversial to this day, however. Needless to say they have given us a peek into the human mind and why we might do what we do. Human behavior is highly complex.
If you’re different and you live your best life, the group has been long conditioned to ostracize, maybe even kill you.
If you’re different, your very actions no matter how harmless are often deemed as deviant behavior, outlandish, godlessness, and anti establishment. That’s a precarious spot to find yourself in. Historically, even those with new ideas were considered suspect, sometimes driven out of business and out of town. The group could most often convince those sitting on the fence to join their ranks, even if they were just bystanders who did nothing to intervene on behalf of the persecuted. There have been plenty of bystanders down through the ages.
It has boggled my brain for years that so many people are really, really, really bothered when someone chooses to do things differently.
I noticed it when I was a kid. I mean a really little kid in elementary school. That’s when I started standing up to the bullies which often didn’t bode well for me either.
As an adult it hasn’t gotten any easier.
There’s so many, many, many things that bother the group that in the end, I think we tend to merely go through the motions of living rather than risk antagonizing the group. We’re so well conditioned that even when we’re unhappy, we can’t identify why.
It rarely if ever crosses our minds to question the expectations of the culture we inherited.
I’m not a fan of humans for the most part. The species as a whole tends to make life even harder for itself than it already is as far as I’m concerned. A while back, I read a news story about a little boy in the U.S. who was playing in a mud puddle and accidentally got a drop of water in his nose. It just so happened that the water contained a brain eating amoeba and within a few weeks, the boy was dead.
Gulp!
Those horrendous stories are a dime a dozen, too. We know it and it makes us anxious but instead of giving one another a break, we tighten the screws and double down on the manmade torture elements as well. Yeah, there really are human beings who sit around and invent ways to torture people. Just read about the fun times in the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition.
Why on earth do we make people’s lives as miserable as we can by denying them even the smallest of freedoms?
And, don’t get me started on mob mentality. That’s about as disturbing as it gets. Wanna get hung from a tree for your skin color? Or maybe you’ve been deemed a witch. Did you get pregnant out of wedlock so the village sent you to a home for unwed mothers where nuns tried to beat some sense into your derelict head?
Wait a minute. Are you starting to think that you better tighten that corset after all?
Well, before you do, I’ve got a better idea. How about we find a way to open our hearts and minds to diversity? What about that for starters. I know it’s a lot to ask and most people will resist, but we have to do something. Just look around you. The world is filled with variety. It’s that very diversity that makes this planet thrive with teeming life.
Everything that’s different isn’t weird. It’s wonderful and exciting and full of creative promise.
I’d like to think that if the little boy who died from the brain eating amoeba had sidestepped the mud puddle, he wouldn’t have grown up to get killed by his own species for being gay. I’d like to think that new ideas are cherished not feared. I want to believe that we can broaden our scope of possibilities, that a narrow view isn’t our destiny. Open mindedness, freedom that really means something, diversity that gives our world color, and the ability to create a home where our children can thrive is waiting to be embraced.
Why not allow different to exist? Or better yet, encourage it to flourish? It’s time!
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
