What is a freeformist?
It’s a word I made up at 2 AM on a Friday night after spending hours on my laptop googling “what is the opposite of conformist” and realizing there was no word for it besides “non-conformist” which doesn’t have a very good ring to it, so I invented one.
You know that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle runs out of her house in disgust at being proposed to by basic-af Gaston and being trapped in her small-minded town and then bursts out onto a beautiful field of grass and sings about how she wants adventure in the great, wide, somewhere as the orchestral music comes to a glorious climax? When this scene came on in the theater a few weeks ago, I literally cried. Granted, I was also a bit inebriated, but I related so much to Emma Watson in that moment that I had an actual visceral response to it. I, too, want so much more than this provincial life.
If that Disney princess analogy went over your head, that’s okay.
Basically, what I’m saying is that the older I get, the more I’m realizing that I’m not very good at traditionally adult things. I don’t like dressing/speaking professionally. I kind of hate working in offices from 9-5. I can’t really imagine myself getting married anytime soon, and the idea of accumulating more and fancier things sort of makes me queasy.
When most people around us are doing all of these things, it’s tough to not follow suit. And maybe eventually I’ll want to settle down and go down this path, because if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that we are constantly changing human beings. But right now, every fiber of my being is screaming at me to do something different. To blaze my own trail in a non-cliche-snowflake-millennial type of way.
I started this blog to explore the ways that we can live our most authentic lives, building the cultural norms we want to see in the world at a time when our current culture is low key destroying the planet. I also started it because I’m unemployed and have nothing better to do right now.
This is really long for an about me page. And yet I managed to fail to tell you my name. It’s Kelly. I like bugs and singing to my plants and procrastination, and if you’re still reading this I like you too!