​When I was in grade two, some kids were upsetting me at school. In all honesty, I don’t remember what exactly I was sad about, but I guess I was upset enough that I told my parents. To get the kids to stop bothering me, my dad stepped in.

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At the end of a spring day, the whole class was lined up in the classroom with our backpacks on. It was the usual routine before we made our way to our school bus line ups. My friend, Kenny, was at the front of the line and made a statement to the class: “Alya, your dad’s here.”

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My dad was five-seven and built like a brick shit house. With tattoos dotting his arms and multiple cartilage piercings, he made quite a statement walking into my class in cargo shorts and a white vest. I remember his frame filling up the doorway and his presence becoming the focus of everyone in the room. I walked up to the front of the line from the back of the classroom with a smirk. He grabbed my backpack and we left.

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As you can see, the parenting choices of my mom and dad didn’t follow closely to the strict, conservative Christian homes they were raised in Guyana. The traditions we’ve made for ourselves as a family reflect this, no matter how strange.

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Traditions are rituals. They include passed down values and impact one generation to another. Across continents and cultures, traditions have wormed their way into the fabric of many people's beings. Whether it is a rite of passage ritual involving the Torah, a coming-of-age party for a teenage girl in an extravagant dress, or simply a beef stew that is only meant to be eaten at Christmas time, rituals help people to identify themselves as part of something bigger than them. Traditions can bring a powerful sense of belonging to both individuals, and groups. My body has been the site of many personal traditions since I was a child. It may sound old school, but the sense of togetherness and comfort that it brings is undeniable. I even find with repetition comes the feeling of safety. There's something deeply human about wanting things to remain the same in order to avoid pain. By sticking to tradition, you know what to expect. This desire for safety influences our choices from what we’ll make for dinner, to what political party we’ll vote for. There are no surprises, and you can be prepared for whatever is thrown at you. We’ve evolved to see the unexpected as a threat.  

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Most would say that I’m not a traditionalist. They would say this because, on the outside, I appear to be a leftist hippie that encourages the expression of the individual while believing in working towards the greater good. I want people to do whatever the fuck they want, but to try and be considerate of the greater good. I understand that this can get a little contradictory, but aren't we all?  

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At ten, I was frequently streaking my hair with neon blue and green gels at the crack of dawn before school. It would flake throughout the day and get on whatever I was wearing, but it made me feel excited to display myself to the world. I grew up watching my older sister spend hours in the bathroom with plastic bags tied around her shoulders changing her black hair into various shades with pungent boxed hair dyes from Shoppers Drug Mart, from auburns to blonde and everything in between. When I was thirteen, I started really dying my hair, with bleach and the whole shebang. It started off with my mom and sister bullying me into bleaching a streak in my side bangs and dying them red on a random Tuesday evening. My entire family saw me as some artsy-fartsy nerd crossed with a new wave hipster, so they figured this new look was a natural progression. I’d be lying if I said they were wrong. I turned out to like the look and slowly started dying more of my hair throughout high school. Purple, pink, red, blue, green, and different combinations of colours screamed down the hallways trailing behind me. I did it all, and I was having the time of my life.

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The older I got, the more my hair became an expression of my identity as an outsider. I felt I didn’t fit in anywhere, so it made sense that my hair shouldn’t either. It got to the point where I used to get dirty looks from old white ladies on the bus ride home from school. The first time was a damp, rainy April day during my senior year. At this point, I had progressed to having ass-length neon pink hair. That, paired with my nose ring and studded faux leather jacket was quite a statement. I looked like an asshole, and I was one. I slid my bus ticket into the machine and made my way to the empty back of the bus. As I squinted through the raindrops on my glasses, I saw an elderly white woman with a head of fluffy silver hair and a scowl that was just as striking. She looked me dead in the eye as her upper lip curled up towards her nose. I wasn’t expecting it and snapped my eyes forward. I hustled to my seat and sat there quietly until I got home.
 

I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the whole bag. I was bullied in school as a child for standing out, whether it was my weight or my smelly ethnic lunches. When it came to my extended family, they didn’t understand why I liked listening to white-people-indie-pop instead of chutney. I grew up with a ton of hyper-feminine-girl-cousins on one side of the family that were like older sisters to me, and none of them understood why I didn’t like high heels or jewellery. No one understood why I liked watching anime, and not Keeping Up with the Kardashians. No one understood why I would spend Saturday nights reading fanfiction in my bedroom alone, rather than going out to dinner with twenty-plus people. No one understood why I was the way I was. I don’t think I did either and that scared me. I was always different, no matter where I went. I was an outsider in my own home, as well as at school. So, when I got older, I decided to lean in to not fitting in. I prided myself on being different. All of this accumulated into the look that upset that old lady the moment I stepped on the bus.

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While I had gotten stares from people at grocery stores, theatre competitions, and Christmas dinners, I was rarely met with such a malicious look. Children would look at me with awe, their eyes shining as I sauntered past them at the park. Once at the library, I participated in a stranger's term project for their media class because they needed somebody with coloured hair, and they just so happened to run into me that evening. Drunk girls would approach me in the street falling over my bright locks, telling me how gorgeous I was. I liked the attention. It made me feel good about myself. For once, I was being commended for not fitting in. I wasn’t in love with anything about my body, but my hair meant that I could get other people to like me, even if for the slightest bit. It was so refreshing.

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But that scowl threw me off. It warned me that if I couldn’t exist in the ways the world around me expected me to, there would be consequences. It sent me right back to where I was before I started to embrace my otherness: a terrified little kid that wasn’t sure if she was worthy of belonging. The sad part is that all I was really doing that day was being myself. A self that I thought was working for me after years of inhabiting a body that wasn’t. Yet somehow, I had managed to deeply offend a complete stranger and feel like shit all over again.

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Despite the criticism from this stranger, the backlash from my extended family and the chiding of my grandmother, I loved my coloured hair deeply. Changing up my hair before the start of the school year became a yearly ritual. Refreshing my hair with dye before a school concert became a part of my routine. Maintenance of cold-water hair washing, and gentle conditioning became an ingrained part of my everyday. As my being evolved to accommodate this new part of myself, it was simultaneously upsetting those around me. I changed my perspective and discovered that it actually felt good to piss them off. For once, I was in the driver's seat and there was no way in hell I was going to go back to the self-doubt that I felt on the bus that day. I was purposely doing something within my power to upset others. During my childhood and youth, my existence in the body I had was a means of being victimized. I did nothing with the intention to bring upon the criticism or hate. They took the power I had in being myself away from me by weaponizing it against me. With this new act of colouring my hair as obnoxiously as possible, I took my power back.

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I imagine this is what my dad felt when he got his first tattoos a few years after I was born. He got his daughters' names across his arms, in the toughest Latin-inspired font, a testament to his love for us. Or maybe it started when he began getting piercings when my sister and I were little. While his side of the family was generally appalled at his failing to resemble a conservative Christian like the rest of them, he persisted. After almost two decades in Canada of being excluded from school projects and getting pulled over by racist cops for having too nice a car for a Brown man, my dad had a weariness about him that was eager to defy the norms that had hurt him for so long. When this ritual of beautification was then passed down to his own daughters, there's no doubt in my mind that it also made him feel as though he was empowering us to be our authentic selves. The last thing my parents ever wanted for us was to feel the same shame that they did for being Brown in a country that dehumanized them.

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We had a family tradition where when my sister or I got our first body piercings, our dad went with us and got a piercing as well. It started when my sister got her nose ring at sixteen. Dad took her to a local piercing spot that has had a two-for-one deal for as long as anyone can remember. She got her nose ring, and he got his first eyebrow piercing. The same thing happened five years later when I was sixteen. I got my nose ring, and he got his second eyebrow piercing. This open defiance of the conservative views of my dad’s side of the family was something of a rite of passage for my sister and me. As much as we were embracing our South-Asian ancestry with our nose rings, it was also an acknowledgement on behalf of our parents of us growing into young women and emerging into our own independence. By symbolically supporting our body autonomy with this ritual, our parents let us know that they were on our side. They have lived up to that solidarity ever since.

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As much as I’d like to think that my family’s strange habits are those that empower us, I could be wrong. Unfortunately, I have a concern that my sense of individuality was likely the result of the large-scale commodification of the ‘other’. Capitalism has allowed otherness to become something that is able to be condensed into a fifteen-dollar jar of hair dye and sold off to the next schmuck that doesn't fit in the crowd. I find myself constantly stuck in the loop of wondering if my sense of individuality is authentically my own, or a manufactured product of what I am told is the counterculture of the moment. Somewhere along the line, American hippie fashion became affluent globetrotter bohemian chic. Punk became middle-class suburban mall goth. Grunge became double zero waste skilled at e-girl makeup. All cultures evolve, whether we like it or not.

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That’s what happens when someone from marketing at Fashion Nova finds an alternative teenager’s Instagram and decides to rip off the designs from their small business. It’s the capitalistic circle of life for all creatives. Sometimes, those taking part might make it so that aesthetic choices are more accessible to those that desire to take part. Other times, you get a watered-down version that can be found in the seasonal section of your local big-box store. The evolution of subcultures is inevitable. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m buying into the commodification of them.

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Looking back, I’m glad I pissed off that old lady, even if I was a monument to capitalism when doing so. Maybe my dad’s double eyebrow piercings aren’t as unique as he thought. Maybe my hair wasn’t as ground-breaking as it made me feel. Maybe my whole family has fooled ourselves into thinking that we’re on the edge of something new and revolutionary. But is it so wrong to hope so?