Unconventional

Over the past few weeks, so comments have been made to me that have given me pause, and have led me to some great memories. The first comment was that I'm like a little old lady. I know in the context of that comment, the person meant that I do not engage in activities that are common for my age. I would rather read then talk on the phone. I like to write longhand letters as opposed to emails. I love to knit (which I have been doing for 9 years) and cross stitch (which I started learning while in Brownies for Girl Scouts). It was as if the person who made the comment said that I was told old for my age. A similar comment was made this past week when someone told me that I have lived too much life for my age.

Such comments made me think about how we try to define what is the appropriate behavior for certain age groups. The psychological models that I studied in school, are no longer seen as guiding marks or a model, rather as absolutes. But we live in a world where absolutes are a rarity. But the thought of having absolutes give us comfort - we want clear boundaries that help us to define and then size up other people.

That creates a problem for me, because I've never really been conventional or engaging in the same activities as most people my age. Perhaps in was my introverted nature, but more likely it was just being encouraged to live into my passions - I was a children's program teacher by 7th grade, a Sunday School teacher by 10th. Some of the books we read for advanced English my senior year of high school I had read in 8th, books from the same class my sophomore year I had read in 4th grade. While others did projects to get by, I refused to hand in anything that I wasn't proud of or excited about. While other kids my age went to the movies, I would rather read a book at home. Currently, while other people may have a dog or a cat, I have a pet chinchilla.

My struggle recently is to embrace this unconventional part of myself - to be proud of and live into the reality that I don't act my age, because I firmly believe that there aren't real criteria of what someone should be doing at my age - there may be some guide posts (which is another post entirely) but I have lived the life I have been blessed with up to this point in the fullest, doing the things that I am passionate about. And if this means that I no longer fit into others assumptions or expectations, I'm okay with that. We need to embrace people for who they are, not who some psychological theorist tells us they should be. Otherwise, we are saying the creative God who made each of us unique, really just made each of us out of a conventional template.




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