Have Your Own Things

I’ve been feeling kind of strange the whole morning right up until, like, 10 minutes ago when I started listening to Paramore; and then I realised the strange feeling was due to the fact that I dreamt I was Hayley Williams and played at Reading Festival last night. I want to be Hayley Williams more than anything else right now.

I think it’s kinda weird when people (myself included) want to be other people. It’s a given though, that everyone wants to be at least one other person. One other person who’s prettier, more talented, richer etc and there’s nothing wrong with that. You naturally wish to be someone whom you look up to instinctively, and that could be a good source of motivation if utilised correctly.

I, for one, can relate very much to that. Of wanting to be someone else. When I was 12, I used to keep this notebook of names of people in my school whom I aspire to be like (in retrospect, that’s a very creepy thing to do) and I even had progress bars complete with percentages of completion. How I managed to measure my progress is beyond me, but that’s not the point. The point is, I never once thought of improving being like myself rather than being someone else.

I know that there is no such thing as a pure personality because everything else around you influences you to be the person you are today. The books you read, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, the wars you fight, the victories you win and most importantly, the people you meet, all of them shape you to be who you are currently, so it’s safe to say we give and take from every single person, every single character in the stories of our lives. That is okay. What is not okay is fantasising being someone else wholly and replacing your ambitions and ideas with those of others with the help of horribly self-drawn progress bars on exercise books with your primary school logos on the front covers of them.

That’s why now I’m more towards aiming for elements out of the norm, I guess. I used to be very self-conscious in a dress but now I allow myself to wear Doc Martens boots to college if I want to despite it being almost as heavy as combat boots and got comments like, “Why do you even wear them when it’s so heavy and hot?” because the answer to that is always, always “Because I can and want to.”

No one should ever live their lives dictated by anyone else. If someone tells you you can’t do something you want to do, go ahead and do it anyway even if it infuriates them. And I don’t mean that you should break every rule, ignore every red light; I mean it when people try to tell you you shouldn’t wear or do or write anything just because it’s “weird” and “strange” and “something I’d never do”. Show them that doing that thing they’re afraid to do is actually rewarding and fun and not as bad as they make it out to be and if possible, get them to do it too. This is a very restricted topic though because I’m not talking about anything like playing truant or arson or anything. Because I’m getting very fed up of negative people I’ve met in the course of my new college life who call people “uncivilised” just because they’ve never seen anyone climb over a table before and “weird” just because they dress differently and act differently and speak differently from themselves. And it sucks, especially when you’re embarking on a journey to find out who you really are and trying entirely new things in an entirely new surrounding with entirely new people. So, you know, just keep it PG and don’t bulldoze every other person who aren’t you.

And that’s why, everything I do and say, I aim to stand out from the rest. In a good way. I try not to give a stereotypical answer if I can. Be spontaneous whenever possible. Have my own things, my own habits and my own quirks and my own creativity. Knowing myself, it was more than difficult to start doing that when I tend to blend into the background most of the time, but it sure beats strictly sticking to the norm, and at least I’m discovering an identity for myself.

On another note, I went to watch the One Direction movie in IMAX 3D last Friday with my classmates and it was a frickin’ concert in itself because every other pre-pubescent girl in the cinema was screaming things like “I LOVE YOU ZAYN” and yelling the lyrics to their songs and just, perfection. The undying spirit of fangirls in all its pureness.