The Craving of Being Different - but not too different because then you're just weird

Person 1: What does craze even mean?

Person 2: It's a word you use when something's ultra popular.

Person 1: But isn't it 'cool' to be 'different' and 'alternative'.

Person 2: Yes, exactly.

Person 1: Well then isn't being 'different' a craze.

Person 2: Of course.

I have to physically restrain my eyes from doing a full 360°C whenever I see a photo on instagram or a status on facebook that depicts a teenage girl so obviously trying to be as different as she can without tripping and face-planting over the line of coolness drawn out by the unknown. This whole alternative craze right now is so painstakingly contradictory that alternative has lost it's meaning completely.

The unwritten rule book of what is 'cool' states that; 'to be alternative is to follow all the trends first and to find music that will inevitably become popular in a few months first - not to have your own ideas and opinions and express them in the way you live your life.' Therefore to be alternative, the cool way is to not be different at all, but it's to be MAINSTREAM, completely and utterly MAINSTREAM (are your eyes stinging yet try-hards?). 

But alternative can be interpreted in so many different ways. My definition is that to be alternative you must have your own opinions and feelings about things, no matter if they're popular or, on the other side of the spectrum,  seen as complete trash. To be alternative is to be original. And to be original is to be yourself, not some edited and controlled version of it.

*I'm sorry if you didn't catch the sarcasm of this entire post, but it was there. 

Faking Me

Okay so sometimes I get these really weird obsessions with another persons life so much so that I want to be them. Everything about them seems so amazing and desirable that I am just about ready to ditch my own life for theirs. At those times I'm probably stalking them on every social media account they have just so I can keep tabs on their oh so glamorous lives. Sounds sad, I know, but judge me later because I have a point that I'm heading towards at a torturously slow pace.

So as I'm stalking them and bowing down at their feet, I reconsider how I act towards people and what first impressions I make on others. I wish that I could have the personality and persona of these people I prop up on a pedestal oh so high and I start comparing myself to them and thinking of 'all the things' I have in common with them. But now when I look back on how I act with other people I wonder if I'm really being me or I'm just faking a personality that I don't actually own. How am I supposed to know who I really am when I could be tricking myself into being this other person who in reality, I only just admire? At what point in life do you actually know who you are? I completely understand how painstakingly cliche this all sounds, I'm just another teenager searching for themselves, (I honestly considered backspacing that line but that would ruin the authenticity of this post now wouldn't it) but I don't know if I'm lying to myself, how am I supposed to know?

It annoys me when someone says just be yourself because saying that to someone who doesn't even know who they are makes it that much harder to stay true to who you are. To be honest, I don't think I'll ever become aware to 'who I am' but I guess I should stop thinking about it and go with the flow of life because apparently I think too much.