Confessions of a Conformist

I live in Orange County, California. I've never actually seen the tv show "The OC", but from the commercials, it seems pretty accurate. So too, by the way does the show "Desperate Housewives". You may even be familiar with the reality show "The Desperate Housewives of Orange County".

We moved here when I was 16. Before that we lived in northern CA in Calaveras County. It is east of San Francisco. It is famous because it is the home of Angel's Camp, the center of Mark Twain country. The Calaveras County Fair is also known as the The Annual Frog Jumping Festival. It is beautiful. My house was in a little town called "Valley Springs". We had an acre and a half plot with a creek in the back, and dozens of giant oak trees. When I was younger I thought it was magical and inhabited by faeries. I visited this house every other weekend from age 10 to 14. At 14 i left my mother to live full time with my father and stepmother. Since then I have seen my mother 3 times. I have not spoken to her in 4 years. She doesn't know that I am married or that I have a child.

It was the first time I was in public school since 4th grade. I spent 4th to 9th grade at a very private school in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was beautiful there too, in the middle of the redwood forest. It was a lot like living in "Little House on the Prairie". We didn't have proper plumbing. We had no electricity. The property (about 1200 acres) housed most of the members of the church in small little buildings made out of redwood. The property dated back from Native Americans. On many hikes I have done there I have found campfire sites, along with arrowheads and mortar and pestle like tools. The next people known to inhabit it were the Jesuits. It was a monastery. They were very active with bookbinding. None of the buildings they built were altered. People built additions to the original buildings, but most of them have been there for over 200 years. After the Jesuits, the next known people to inhabit it were hippies. It became a hippie commune. From the hippie commune emerged a powerful woman who was a painter and a well-known psychic. She founded a church. Hence, the church and school of my elementary years.

I really did love it there until the woman I just mentioned, passed away and another woman attempted to take her place. She didn't have the same kind of "sensitivity" and was very self-righteous. I was 13 going on 14. High school was difficult because I started to have and voice questions. People became very intrusive. They became overinvolved in my home life, and started to tell me how I should wear my hair. The school dress code said no make-up, but one of my teachers told me I should care about my appearance because God does.

Meanwhile I would go to my dad's every other weekend, and my stepmother, who is an interior designer, would take me shopping. I would take the clothes home to my mother's, and she would sneer with disgust at my weakness. Giving in to the temptations of "the World" or the desire to be "worldly" was the worst sin a person could commit. What was strange was that I really didn't care either way. I could do with or without the pleasures of the world. I can enjoy the world from a place of simplicity and humility. That doesn't mean I don't also know how to indulge in the pleasures of being in the flesh in the world.

Once I settled in to public school, I was ridiculed. I thought there must be something physically wrong with me because of the way people treated me. The little cheerleader girls in their perfectly "in style" fashion and fixed hairstyles stared and whispered when they saw me. I didn't really care too much, but I needed to find friends who could understand me. I very quickly decided to separate myself from the "norm" and used fashion to make that statement. I started painting spiderwebs on my face, gave myself multiple piercings. I started listening to music like "Christian Death" and reading "The Satanic Bible". It wasn't so much that I was angry with God, but i was disgusted by the people around me. In a way it was my personal experiment with the world around me. I can tell you this, I made some very interesting friends, and also bonded with many of my teachers. I began writing poetry. I got into theater. All of it was about acting, and making sure that I didn't allow myself to be restricted by anyone else's standards. i got great satisfaction out of this, but looking back, it wasn't really worth the pain I caused my poor, scared Christian parents.

Today I live in Orange County. As I said, we moved here when I was 16. It was really strange at first. I couldn't believe the security at the high school, with chained link fences and barbed wire, security guards in golf carts. I quickly figured my way around these minor obstacles and succeeded in ditching so much school that by the beginning of my senior year, even if I went to school everyday, I would have to spend everyday in In House suspension to make up for my absences. My school counselor ripped up all my truancies, hoping I would come back. I dropped out in April my senior year when I turned 18.

The main reason I ditched and dropped out of school was because i failed so much PE that I had to drop out of French III and Drama in order to take 4 periods of PE back to back. I hated PE because I didn't like undressing in front of other people. Oddly, if I went to class and wasn't "in uniform" I lost more points than if I never went in the first place. So I would ditch school to hang in the library, or read in the park. My senior year in high school I read Crime and Punishment, The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Complete Works of Plato, Resurrection by Tolstoy, Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Les Miserable, Lolita, and the Kama Sutra, among others. I graduated 4 months after the end of that school year, because PE wasn't a requirement in Adult Ed.

The strange thing I discovered about Orange County was that even the "non-conformists" had rules about belonging. I got really sick of the "elite goths" and "hardcore punks" I initially thought would understand me. Hanging out with them in their "area" on campus was no different than any other clique. I actually befriended more jocks and choir kids than I did my "own kind". I realized that there really was no such thing as "non-conformity" and just decided to be who I was, regardless of what anyone thought. Oddly, i became extremely popular. I could hang out in any crowd on any part of the campus, except for the little gothic "kids in the hall" as I named them.

Once out of high school, I didn't rely on extreme fashion to separate myself from the masses. I began to understand the power of appearing to blend in. Being blonde haired and blue eyed, it's very easy for me to look "normal". As I entered the grown up work force, and started community college, I began to shed my rebellious ways. I figured out very quickly that what made me different than most had nothing to do with my appearance. It was about how I thought and processed the world around me. i soon developed a love for the people around me. I stopped seeing my uniqueness as an oddity that served to separate me from my fellow humans. I then started to see that my earlier efforts to define myself stemmed from hostility. I was angry at the way that I felt judged by my appearance, and decided to use my appearance to intimidate and alienate others. It felt good to have people fear me, but it feels better to have people trust me. I resemble the perfect "conformist" but remain the same impassioned "individualist".

Endnote: This blog has become an introduction to what I initially wanted to write about it. Guess I'll post the next chapter in a blog to come. Look for "Plastic Fantastic; Life in the OC"