The Rebel Within: Embracing Our True Selves

When I was growing up I spent an awful lot of time and energy rebelling. Parental guidelines, not society in general. The parental boundaries felt like a steel band stopping me from living and breathing. once to this rebellion was an innate sense of rightness a moral compass if you will. In school, I was someone else. I internalised the rebel and did everything right and made sure everyone else did too. If I had to keep the rules then so did everyone else. I had an integrity meter that was on overdrive. I was terrified of being sent to detention or worse getting the dreaded strap or the cane. In the sixties, school was a nightmare where the teachers were the bullies. I kept my head down, worked hard and channelled Hermione Granger. Naturally after masking all day I let it all out at home. My poor family had to deal with the real me.

This resulted in my parents clamping down even harder. They were rigid and expected obedience. When I asked to have friends over, my mother wrote up a set of rules and put it up on the wall in my ‘sitting room.’ It was my sister’s old room converted into a music/hang out area for me and my friends. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, I’d run away from home a few times and the hang out space was a concession (bribe) to lure me into staying at home. I was promised my own phone extension, which never materialised. The rules stated something like:

My mother would personally make sure the rules were adhered to. I was mortified – as only a teen can be.

My least favourite rule was that I wasn’t allowed to own a pair of denim jeans. According to my (British) parents, they were only worn by ‘common people.’ Not that we were members of the royal family, my mother just behaved as if we were. I hated free-dress days at secondary school with a passion. I longed to wear jeans like everybody else. I regularly begged my mother to buy me a pair. The closest I got was a pair of corduroy slacks and a ‘nice’ blouse.

My older brother and sister quietly got on with being perfect. They were held up to me as paragons of virtue. I was the black sheep, the rebel, the outspoken, argumentative one. It’s no wonder I ran away so many times. I don’t think cool jeans was the real issue. I would have argued about the colour of the sky.

This rebellion threaded its way all through my life. I had a strong sense of justice and often found myself arguing my point with anyone I considered to be in the wrong. Cruelty to children or animals or anyone really, neglect, anything remotely unjust, I was there fighting for the cause. I was anti war and would have marched in the Vietnam war moratorium in May 1970, except I was wearing tweeds skirts and living in America at the time.

It took me a long time to realise not everyone cared about right and wrong and not everyone appreciates being corrected. Life is not as black and white as I saw it. There’s an awful lot of grey area. This thing that is in me won’t allow me to cut corners or turn a blind eye. I won’t rip off the system or take what I’m owed. I know people who take stationary home from work because they feel they deserve it or they’ll fill their trailer with council gravel at the weekend because they pay their taxes. You’d think I’d be ok with that because it’s a rebellious act. No, I also have this strong sense of right and wrong. My dad used to bring home stationary from work and often picked up ‘abandoned’ tools at building sites. I could have followed in his footsteps because it was modelled to me. I couldn’t ever bring myself to do it.

Now that I’m old and wise (ahem) I am can see that this oppositional part of me is who I am. My mum said I was contrary. She would say, ‘If I said it was black you’d say it was white.’ She was probably right, not that I ever admitted that to her while she was alive. It takes one to know one.

I have learned ways to stop myself from constantly fighting back. I avoid using the words ‘never’ and ‘always.’ They are argumentative words. When someone says ‘You never take the bins out——’ or ‘ I always have to do the dishes——’ the other person invariably gets their back up because there was that one time they put the bins out or did the dishes. Hearing ‘never’ and ‘always’ brings up our sense of injustice. It’s like a red rag to a bull.

When I was growing up, I thought everyone saw the world like I did. It’s hard to imagine the way others see life when we only have our own experience to measure it by. I thought everyone felt the way I did. That they wanted to stop world poverty and free all the animals in the world from cruelty and neglect. Then there’s all those other quirks that have nothing to do with my rebelliousness, like remembering lines from movies and singing a song for every phrase other people say. Being able to speak bits of ten other languages and turning our pets into puppets by giving them voices. Turns out I have no idea how other people experience the world and I’m quite weird when it all boils down to it.

What does a person with a strong oppositional nature do when there’s not much to oppose? Being retired means having no-one telling me what to do or what to wear or where to go. Does that rebellion dry up or dissipate after all these years? Nope, I can tell you it is still there, it’s masked, tempered, refined and it hasn’t gone anywhere. I have passed it on to my children and my grandchildren. I hear it in them and see it play out in their lives. It’s not a bad thing, it’s what makes us who we are.

So here’s to all the quirky, loveable weirdos quoting random lines from movies, to those that have a gazillion songs running through their heads and to the ones who fight injustice and rebel against stupidity in all its forms. May we continue to be our wonderful marvellous selves regardless of what others think or would prefer.