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Author's Note: This article is kind of a continuation on my article "Freedom". It will talk about what peer pressure is, along with a personal experience with peer pressure. This is not supposed to be a sob story, just what peer pressure feels like from different perspectives.
Peer pressure is a serious issue. You could say that it's one of those "classic" things - always has existed, always will. I'll bet that you have a general idea of what I'm talking about. People around you are trying to make you "better" by making you act a certain way, wear certain clothes, etc. If you want the official dictionary definition, here it is: social pressure by one's peer group to take a certain action, adopt certain values, or otherwise conform in order to be accepted. Peer pressure is one of the many flaws we as humans have.
I don't know exactly why we do it, why we need other people to change themselves in order to make ourselves happy. Usually, I don't worry about what others think of me. I just go about my day and act friendly to others as best as I can. Awkward and embarrassing moments are one of my specialties, and I've learned to make fun of myself which makes me more confident. At school, I don't have just one group of friends, so I could sit down with almost anyone in my grade at lunch and enjoy myself after the first few awkward moments. I am friends with boys as well as girls, and no matter who I'm hanging out with, I almost always have a good time. This is how I usually am - happy, confident, and random.
I'm also a community theater actress. Just recently, I was in a play where I had a lead role for the first time. Not only that, but I had been friends with a few people that I had been in a previous play with. Because of this, I was kind of "popular" and had a sort-of clique with these friends. We were different ages and coed, but we were practically inseparable at rehearsals and performances. I had other friends there, and I was still nice to the other kids, but I felt like I truly belonged to this group. It felt great. In some of the other plays I was in, there was a group like this, but I didn't really fit in with them. Along with that, some of my closer friends started ditching me at lunch, so this group was really important to me. When I got to rehearsal that night, I'd feel relieved, like I had finally reached the main event of my day.
I'll admit it, some of the kids in the group would start saying mean things about the other kids, like how someone would do something to annoy us or something like that when we were bored. It got to the point where we'd ignore some kids because we couldn't stand them. When performances came around, I'd arrive early, talk to some of the kids I was afraid to talk to with my clique around, and then mosey over to someone from the group who had arrived. In a way, we were the popular kids of the cast. We were really exclusive a lot of the time, and usually I wasn't okay with it. I could have easily stood up to them, but I was scared that they wouldn't "accept" me anymore as part of their group. I didn't think that I could be "in" and my rest-of-life self at the same time.
One day, we had a double performance with 2 1/2 hours between shows, and it had recently snowed outside. A bunch of kids were going outside to play in the snow, my group included. I was invited to go outside with them, but I really didn't want to. I didn't feel like getting all cold, and besides, I had another performance soon, and I wasn't going to walk around the stage with squeaky shoes! But I didn't want to be separated from my group. What if this ended being the reason they didn't want me in the group anymore?? I was pretty nervous, but I walked up to one of my friends and told him, "Thanks for inviting me, but I'm not going to go outside with you guys. If you'd like, you can stay inside and play Curious George Uno with me." (I know it sounds geeky, and it is, but I love Curious George, and was starting to let small parts of my randomer side out.) After a bit of light persuasion, the rest of my group ran outside, leaving me in the basement of the theater. Alone.
I found a few girls who were my friends as well and invited them to play Uno with me. They accepted, and we played for a while, enjoying our time together. It was then that I realized that these were the people I should have been hanging out with the whole time. I mean, those other kids were some of my very close friends, but I should have reached out and at least invited them to be part of the group. I definitely was not okay with that.
After that, I wasn't exactly the same. I was trying harder to invite other kids to join our activities, but it was too late for me to completely detach myself from the old group. I still wanted to be accepted by them, but now I was seeing what some of the kids went through before performances. While I was standing around with my friends and talking, they were sitting there and doing solitary activities like reading a book until it was time for warm ups. I felt bad for them, and really mad at myself for not doing something sooner, but I couldn't seem to come to a compromise between the clique and the other kids. Finally, I just tried to be nice to all the kids whenever I could. A great difference I probably made - by this time it was in the middle of performances, and I saw these kids for maybe once or twice a week.
Even now, a couple of months after the play's last performance, I feel bad. How often had I rolled my eyes at peer pressure happening at school because the kid couldn't stand up for him or herself? I'd even gone to a camp the past summer that talked about this kind of stuff! Yet here I was, not standing up for myself or others at all just because I wanted to be in the group so bad. I also let myself forget my rest-of-life self by choosing not to open my eyes to what I was doing to the other kids. Somehow, I managed to maintain my "nice person" status with the other people in the play, but inside I knew that I had seriously screwed up, really blown it.
Epilogue-ish thing: Now that that little phase in my life is over, I've gone back to my rest-of-life self. I stood up to my friend and have tried to be nicer to the people I usually don't talk to at school. I'm not perfect or an expert in this area, but I'm trying to be a better person to others than I have been. As for that group of kids, I've only seen them outside of the play once or twice. Guess what? I still couldn't break myself away from them, and I accidentally left one of my other really good friends in the dust during a post-production cast party.
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