One-trick Pony

There is this song I've always liked, a lesser known Nelly Furtado hit from her sophomore masterpiece "Folklore", called "One-trick Pony." And every so often, when I would hear it, I'd want to jump onto the nearest mechanical bull and ride as long as I could, hoping that when I flew off, I would land slow-motion on the soft-ish mats below. But this song has nothing to do with the enchanted reverie of bull-riding, nor does it have anything to do with actual ponies. No, this song is about marching to the beat of your own drum, as the title implies knowing more than one simple trick. It's about being your own person and not succumbing to the demands of a world that seeks to make you into a clone. Not that I hate the world, or even the country in which I live. But many times, I am forced to feel that if I don't conform to certain standards, then I am somehow a perverse corruption, and that I must be extinguished in order to ensure and preserve perfect order. However, I realized that part of the reason why I felt as such was because I was living in a world that was not made for me.

Now this world of mine is not simply that which lies beyond my familial ties, the tangible, 9-5, working my nerves world, but includes everything; every single morsel of stimuli that influences my senses in some profound way. It's my clothing, my hair, my music and my art. It's my slight obsession for dimples and digits. But somehow, along the way, I learned that being an outlier was unattractive, uncanny and unsettling.

That I was all these things disturbed me, and I withdrew.

However, I soon learned a very valuable implication. When I cave in and retreat to what's familiar and comfortable, I lose a part of myself. But when I allow myself to press firmly against the grain, I discover things about myself that I never knew, but things that were always there, burgeoning, waiting to awaken in complete jubilation. When I stopped conforming, I became a new me.