Stopping wanting to conform

I think I'm a bit of a paradox. Somehow I'm a resolute individualist, I've uncompromisingly, though not always as a complete matter of choice (or - unconsciously - was it?) gone the paths less taken, run slightly or fully against the 'should's that bring you all the orthodox things you're supposed to want: Status, money, children, big house, ambition, 'the next thing'. whatever's trendy, any old relationship as long as there is one, and so on. I will not 'make do' to fit in, or risk the total burnout that would inevitably result from the attempt, I simply refuse to do that. And I always knew from a young age that that's how I'd be. I could sense what was for other people, and what was for me. It wasn't a plan, just an intuited direction of travel, oblique to the near-mandatory one. But at that age, it caused me less stress to know it. Less fear. Much less. 

And yet... I'm also cursed with being the world's most self-conscious man, feeling continually judged by the ultra-orthodox majority and even at times (until recently) feeling entirely anolmalous in some respects to the point where fully taking that on board after years of holding it (barely aware I was doing so) at arm's length resulted in a series of major and minor breakdowns and shutdowns/burnouts over the last 5 years in particular. I'm getting better at shielding myself from that, caring less. But it's hard. Only solitude indoors removes from view the pattern of judgement encoded into society's very fabric. But it's not like amnesia starts and ends between entering and exiting my wonderfully modest house. The rumination continues - the signal of all those 'should's cushioned but still existing. And as soon as the television is turned on in any ill-disciplined way (channel hopping), prescribed norms are again relentlessly blasted at me again. 

I suppose a lot of my anxiety comes from being this walking conundrum while not entirely understanding why. So the strange mobius loop of an answer I'd have to give on this one is: I never started, and I never stopped.

Shardovan said:

I suppose a lot of my anxiety comes from being this walking conundrum

I identify with this a lot. I have always felt like a mass of contridictions, almost like two different people in one. It is only now I am starting to figure myself out and find some peace and realise that actually I am just me and have been all along, all it is is that society wants to fit me into neat catagories that I dont belong in so I have accentuated or denied different sections of my personality to fit in with one of those catagories people define themselves in 

I also feel like more than one person! I think some of it is society pulling against me, now and in the past, but a lot of it isn't even that any more (the people around me these days are mostly OK, thankfully), it's me trying to second-guess what other people/society want and getting it wrong. I think I've mentioned here before my fiancee's view that my attempts at masking (which often leave me seeming "blank" and emotionless) are more off-putting to allistics than I would be if I just let myself be myself around other people, with all my weirdnesses (autistic and otherwise).

I also feel like more than one person! I think some of it is society pulling against me, now and in the past, but a lot of it isn't even that any more (the people around me these days are mostly OK, thankfully), it's me trying to second-guess what other people/society want and getting it wrong. I think I've mentioned here before my fiancee's view that my attempts at masking (which often leave me seeming "blank" and emotionless) are more off-putting to allistics than I would be if I just let myself be myself around other people, with all my weirdnesses (autistic and otherwise).