SOOOOO, I struggled to find a song that matched the topic of this weeks blog so I am just going to post the song that I am listening to as I write this (its actually not one song but a CD put into one long youtube song haha). Sooooooooooooo without further ado I give you, Hoodie Allen
As much as we all want to deny it, we have all conformed to fit in at one point or another. If we are lucky we start to realize that if someone doesn't like you for who you truly are than they aren't worth our time and we start to not care about what others think.
What exactly is conformity? Conformity is defined as the tendency to change our perceptions, opinions, or behavior in ways that are consistent with group norms. One example of a time that I caved in to pressure to conform was when I was in high school, in particular my sophomore year.
As a military kid, you are never guaranteed to have all your friends there more than a year and in my case, my entire group of friends moved the summer before my sophomore year in high school and once school started I found myself without a group of friends to hang with. I soon started to hang out with one of the girls in my class, Gwen, and her friends. Gwen was a cheerleader and hung out with the kids that partied, drank, and smoked weed, and I was, at this point, shy, reserved and had never been to a "party".
One night after Gwen's brother and father had left (her mom didn't live with them), Gwen invited me over for a party. I told my mom I was going to go stay the night with Gwen and headed over to Gwen's house. Literally the second I walked in the door she was handing me a shot. Now I had NEVER drank before nor had I really had the urge to, but I wanted to fit in and be accepted that I took the shot, then another, and another...I drank so damn much that night that I honestly don't remember much of that night. That night however, started me on a downward spiral of partying, drinking, skipping class, and more. I didn't necessarily WANT to do any of that, I just wanted to fit in, to conform. This is an example of public conformity which is a superficial change in overt behavior without a corresponding change of opinion that is produced by real or imagined group pressure.
This behavior lasted till second semester of my junior year when I realized that I no longer cared what they thought, I realized that they weren't the kind of people I wanted to associate with and I distanced myself from them and that entire "scene". I got really lucky in that it didnt take me longer to realize that they were not who I needed to be associating myself with. Even more amazing is the group of friends that I met after I stopped hanging out with Gwen and them.
Word Count: 552
*All definitions were provided by the book*
It's crazy how common your story of "Well, I didn't really want to [xyz damaging party behaviors], but everyone else was doing it and I wanted to fit in," is. I wonder how many people at those parties are just there to find a group to fit in with.
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