I have never been one for following social pressures or even glancing at social norms. I am the product of a strong female household that never struggled with striving to be exactly who we are and what we are, staying as true to our nature as possible. Which is exactly what I strive for.

Yes, I was the girl in the lime green jump suit in elementary school because it was my favorite color (was, I have since moved on to camo as my favorite color). I was the girl with blue tipped, purple tipped, red tipped, a few streaks in there on occasion, hair. I used to wear it when I walked into work at my security job and down and proud on a Sunday evening when I stepped into church for worship.

I am the girl who has ten piercings in one ear, two in the other, three tattoos (the fourth and fifth already planned). I am the woman who is young and vibrant, who does what she wants, when she wants, looks responsibility in the face and grabs it by the horns, riding it out into the sunset with flair. I am the student, who is working toward a master’s degree, seeking out new life and new civilizations in a world that only a Christian can know and describe, and a place where God is always residing. I am the writer, who types out words of vast and far away places, who imagines fantastic scenes and characters (yes, including erotica and the devil and, oh my God, lesbians!).

I am the one who looks social pressure in the face and laughs. Social pressure has never done anything for me. It has never uplifted me, stood behind me, strengthened me or helped me. All it has done is downtrodden, laughed and pointed, stuck its ghastly and purple mutated tongue out and spit on me. Social pressures are nothing better than a way to make individuals conform and lose part of their self (which is not a good thing, btw).

This is why.

I’m going to get a bit personal now, hope you don’t mind. I am a victim. Like just about everyone else in this modern day, we are all victims of something. What social pressure wants you to do, what it wants me to do–is stay a victim. Society wants nothing to do with survivors who talk about their problems and experiences in a far of distant land of something that once happened and changed our lives. Societal pressure always wants to make the perpetrator just that. Only a perpetrator. No mix, no good and bad, no loving person in one aspect who hurts in another. There are no shades in society. There is only one color or no color.

I live in the rainbow. A cacophony of colors that make up who I am and what I want to be, just like those streaks and tips I used to wear on a regular basis, proudly stating and claiming and shouting that I AM DIFFERENT.

So stick with this

UBU and IBME

Get it?

You be you, and I’ll be me.

*mwah*

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If you would like to join in the Creative Buzz Hop, just join in already! Write a post in this next week on SOCIAL PRESSURES and post it on your blog. Then you get the wonderful pleasure of going either here or here and linking it to the vast amount of others who participate =P. Afterward, take a minute and read some of the other Buzz Hop submissions.

Here are the “rules” as laid out

1. Display the awesome picture if you choose to participate.

2. Read/comment on other’s blog posts

3. Tag some friends and encourage them to join

4. Write your own prompt! A poem, a short story, (novel might be too long), a personal tale/memoir, an autobiographical stance. Just about anything goes.