Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be different. Sometimes I wanted to be different from other people, sometimes I wanted to be different from who I actually was. When I was a teen, I was all about punk music and funky hair and I spent some time traveling and being sort of off the grid, in my 20's and 30's I oscillated between being deeply involved in alternative community organizing efforts (fighting the system) and being deeply involved in a consumer lifestyle (letting the system win). Now that I'm in my 40's (eek!), I'm feeling really comfortable with who I am, and I don't do anything simply for the point of being different, yet sometimes I realize that I just am different from a lot of the people in my everyday life.
There are a lot of things about "the system" that I disagree with, but rather than fighting to try to make big changes in society, I'm living my life in a way that meshes with my own personal values. Instead of making a lot of noise about how bad things are and telling people what they should do, I'm quietly living a really good life. Some people think I'm weird -- I was telling someome recently about my one in, one out policy, and she said "boy, I wouldn't want to live in your world"-- back when I used to actively aim to be thought of as different or weird, I would have loved to hear that. Now, I'm just a little surprised, because I love my world, so sometimes I forget how different it is.
