The Rebellious Copycat

Well, most people would associate the rebellious phase with our teenage struggle for identity, acceptance and even adolescent curiosity in every-thing. While it seems cool to be different, few teens dare to be really different, and this reminds me of the days I taught and mentored the young ones – which continues to pain me.

On a good day, teen angst may just mean rude, impolite juveniles trying to get on your nerves by punctuating sentences with vulgarities or breaking ‘every’ possible institution rule or challenging you to a melt-down. On a bad day, I would have to deal with ‘rebellious’ teens who sometimes resort to self-injury or self-mutilation just to spite, prove a point or defy their parents. Whatever it is, be it rebellion or defiance, is you look at it with a lens of compassion, you’ll feel one thing – they want to be on the other side of the coin – the side of acceptance; forming a norm, copying someone, something or a trend that they can fit into. They become a copy cat – they don seemingly cool rebellious hairdos, wear outrageous outfits, slap on tons of make-up… etc, just to stand out and be different. However, but doing that, they have ‘subjected’ themselves to the most ‘normalising’ copy cat antics.

I myself have gotten tattoos, piercings and done many silly stuff as acts of rebellion; either consciously, subconsciously, actively or passively (I’m a passive-rebellious sort), crawled home (or somewhere) many times after one drink too many – and I come to realise, that I’m just a copycat, a copycat. It’s like looking at myself in the mirror and see my alter ego tease, “Hey, as much as you want to be a rebel, you “cross” over – you are as good as a conformist in the world of rebellion. But one thing I learnt is that, well, even as I became a copy cat in another world, at least I stepped into another world, I saw things from different perspectives, I learnt things, different ways of ‘catching a rat’ – the key word is different, my comfort zone expanded, my peripheral vision widened, my heart grew ‘softer’, aspirations bigger and most importantly, I grew more inward-looking because I took risks, so I grew, thanks to my silly antics.

As it is, life is full of oxymoron and contradiction, and becoming an adult doesn’t give us the bragging right of saying, we are done with it! I think we are worse off, we (most of us) seek to be copy cats all the time, to be in the safety zone because we fear that when we do something different, we get labelled as defying the social norm, the social constructs… etc

So, I think adults may have a different problem, “Because we fear judgement, we become copy cats to kiss the rat (win the hamster wheelie race) – we conform all the time – and that could be our biggest problem.” And I don’t think that’s what we are made to do or to be – adults are the biggest rebellious copy cats; we defy our true voice, we rebel against ourselves and copy others.