Unlike most teenage girls my age at my school, I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to go with the flow no matter how many times my sister or friends attempt to show me in their magazines what I should be more like. I wear argyle knee socks with loafers, and just yesterday, someone told me I looked like a librarian because I was wearing a dress with pockets and knee socks with my loafers. I don’t believe in hair straighteners or curlers because I think it changes me, not to mention frying your hair after a while. I drive my friends and family crazy with my endless tirades about not changing who you are to impress other people or to fit in, and I run around the house unplugging unused appliances or lights that have been on for hours. My bookshelves are organised like a library, fiction is sorted by the author’s last name and non fiction, well, I don’t have much non fiction these days. The library is my second home, and when my peers go shopping on a Friday evening, I’m at the library, deep in the stacks, loading up all of my bags with 10 or 12 books, which I soon finish within the next week and a half.

Every Friday, I make myself a nice cup of tea and read the newspaper and then sit motionless in a chair, reading for hours. Unlike most kids my age, I don’t watch much TV, and on the weekends, I either watch Lord of the Rings for the fifty-something time or watch a touching documentary about a controversial subject- with a book on the coffee table of course.
And when my peers got their first iPhone, and started wearing makeup, straightening their hair, and wearing more revealing clothes, I stayed the same, wearing collared shirts buttoned up all the way tucked into my cordaroys and managed my wild, curly hair. I got an iPhone a few years ago for Chanukah, but even now I spend most of my time reading or writing, using my phone to tell my mom that I’m on the bus or listen to music while sitting outside on the wall under the trees. In seventh grade, my wall was awash with sparkly and intricate bar mitzvah invitations. When mine came around, I chose a simple invitation on recycled paper and a 2-color, sparkle-less color scheme. When kids text under their desks in class, I have my notebook open, writing my novel. When we entered high school, I still stayed the same, adjusting for my growth by getting taller socks, and bigger loafers which give me horrible blisters if I don’t wear my socks with them. And I proudly show off my Indian heritage with my brightly coloured tunics, even in the dead of winter, where I am the only one wearing bright yellow or red in the classroom.

Many of my peers just want to fit in, to blend in with the crowd. But I like the opposite. Whenever the tides of trend try to suck me under, I fight the undertow and scamper back to my shore. I’m going to be who I want to be, and nobody is going to change that. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”