One of this year's valuable lessons.

I will always remember 2009 as the year I flew off the rails.

Even though I’d gotten off track before (when I shifted from course to course in UP and ended up staying much longer than I had originally intended), I always had a relatively normal life laid out in front of me. Finish school, join a profession, get married, raise a family. 2008 seemed like the year I was settling into a groove. Steady pay, parking space, the works.

Then 2009 started.

For starters, I got married, which had the opposite effect than I would have expected. I found myself living with someone who wanted me to do what made me happy. I was freer than I had originally been, free in ways I couldn’t even imagine before.

It felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and the height terrified me. What did I want to do with my life? Why wasn’t there an easy answer?

I wanted to write, it turned out. Blogging, writing scripts for comics, stories, light novels. I had to go through the wringer of law school to discover that I wanted to be a writer. I suppose it could have been worse. It took a brush with death in the form of a drunk driver to force me to ask myself the hard questions. It took another confrontation with my mortality — the Saturn Rite — to find the answers.

2009 was also the year I discovered that the otaku world was just as political and stratified as the mainstream monoculture. 2009 was the year I stepped on toes I couldn’t see with my rose-tinted weeaboo glasses. It was also the year I discovered that a few words on a small, obscure blog could turn me from an invisible nobody to a marked man, for no clear reason.

Well, no clear reason except that the entrenched oligarchy in any community abhors free speech, anyway.

I mean, it's not like the written word ever hurt anyone. Right?

All around me was societal pressure to conform. Be like the people who sign your checks, so the next ones might be bigger. Be like the people who lord it over the subculture you want to be part of, and someday you might just be cool enough to hang out with them.

Be like everyone else, and someday you might just be accepted.

Here’s a very clear illustration of this point. I had a grand total of one haircut in 2009 — the day I got married. After a few months had passed people noticed that my hair was getting shaggy, and one of the most common questions I got asked was “When are you getting a haircut?” Notice that this question silently assumes that I would be getting one.

“At some point,” I would reply. See, I didn’t want a haircut. I wanted a ponytail. I’d never had one, and I realized the reason I never got one was because in between my usual short good-boy haircut and the Golden Boy ponytail of my dreams was a time my hair would be an awkward length.

Q: How do you go to court with that hair? A: I don't.

I ignored this question from friends and family as it grew more frequent and more insistent, liberally sprinkled with clever quips like “Nice mullet”. The question transformed from its original innocent formulation to “Aren’t you going to get a haircut yet?” I persisted.

Then a funny thing happened as the final months of the year came. People stopped pestering me. Instead of “When are you getting a haircut?” they started saying “Wow, your hair’s so long now!” People started to see what I knew all along — that I would look good with long hair.

Growing out my hair taught me that being true to myself beat the pressure to conform, any day. That sticking to my guns made me a majority of one. That nobody can see the particular vision that I see, which means that the pursuit of my dreams could never depend on the acceptance of others.

This was 2009′s lesson to me. Rehearsal was over. If there was ever a time to start living life for myself, it was now.

And that’s what I did.

Thank you, 2009. You were so educational.

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