I don’t get along with my housemates, and I think I know why. It has to do with group identification, as I wrote about in my thesis. I display the wrong cues — regular hours, neat and tidy, prim and proper, quiet and sensitive. They mistake me for a more stereotypical middle-class white girl, I suspect, and so fail to realize that I share many of their radical anarchist ideals. Even after I espouse them. The group I seem to belong to is antagonistic to the one they (seem) to belong to, that is something along the lines of punk-anarchist.

Not only is it hard to get past first impressions, it’s hard to get past the impressions we consciously choose to make. Actual incompatibilities are compounded by imagined ones. We interact too often like we’re in each other’s way, and when we try to be sociable, we make too many assumptions (and you know what they say about assumptions). They try to corrupt, impress, or intimidate me with harsh visions of the “real world”, as I try to demonstrate how much I actually participate in that dirty, grimy place. (Perhaps a little eagerly, at that.) “I shoot! I camp! I can rough it! I can dumpster-dive!” They look at me skeptically.

I ask them to be more quiet in the wee hours, and they say, “Tough. Deal with it.” Maybe they think I’m so superficial they can get away with being rude to me. Maybe I need to be tough like they say, except to their faces, instead of being mousy and courteous. But dang it, that’s my personality! What looks like naivete is not ignorance, it’s a childlike outlook I cultivate. I refuse to be jaded. That certainly doesn’t entail the conformity of my ideas — indeed, many think I’m crazy for wanting to live off the grid without a car, in a hand-built house and eating food from my own garden. Or that I, or anyone, can make a difference. Heck, people think I’m crazy for believing that we can avoid (even cure!) diseases with diet and exercise, that sentient life is valuable, and that vibrant communities can be built without suffering or oppression or even hierarchies.

And look, I don’t need a leather jacket to be punk. I just need it if I want other punks to friggin’ recognize my right to exist.