This is part one of an eight-part series. Read the other parts here…

When I was six, I went to a street fair with my mother. My little sister was probably there, too. There were booths, from different companies and organizations, as there are at every street fair I’ve ever been to. One of them was about the meat industry—it was probably PETA—and I think that’s the first time my young self made the connection between those furry and feathery creatures I so enjoyed spending time with, and the food on my plate. Right then and there, I decided I was no longer going to eat meat.

I don’t even truly remember this incident. When I try and pull it up in my mind, all I get is the shadowy almost-memory of a story told so many times, you can almost see yourself there. My mother is the one who always told me this story, until I got older and started repeating it myself to those who queried me in-depth about my dietary choices.

I didn’t stop eating meat right away. As determined as I was at six, Chicken McNuggets and hot dogs proved too much of a temptation right up until I was eight and gave those up for good, too.

But the decision was made at six, the summer after my parents pulled me out of kindergarten, and looking back now, I feel like that was probably the first major decision I made in my life that went against the current. It seemed like everyone else ate meat, but this was not something I wanted to participate in. This is yet another time when I’m so grateful to have parents that supported such a decision, despite my young age.

Now, this isn’t meant as a morality tale. Though I still don’t eat meat, I’m not interested in convincing people to change their diets, and that’s definitely not the point of this speech.

It’s just an interesting example of how making decisions counter to those of the dominant culture started early on in my life.

Just by virtue of unschooling, all of us here have made a radically different choice in how we live and learn than that of the mainstream. Whether you chose to never send your kids to school, pulled them out later on, or decided yourself to leave school, it was a huge decision, likely accompanied by much soul-searching and thought. Possibly also a large amount of reading and researching and discussion. Maybe you just followed what felt right. But whatever path lead you away from schooling, I’m sure the impact of that choice was felt in a profound way.

Yet as big a thing as unschooling is in our lives, sometimes I think it isn’t apparent to others just how very many choices we’re making differently in our day-to-day lives. Not only does the unschooled child answer with a shrug and a “why on earth should I know that??” look when asked what grade they’re in, the unschooled parent winces when they hear a parent, as so often happens, threaten to leave their child (who is very much enjoying themselves sitting on the plastic pony in the mall) behind if they don’t come right now! The unschooled parent likely doesn’t understand how parents can scold their children for getting dirty, or rejoice at the beginning of each school year, or if they do understand, they shake their head sadly at their memories of a less enlightened time.

As an unschooling teen, one may make sympathetic noises when their friends complain about being grounded yet again, while secretly just not getting it. Not allowed to go anywhere? Why would parents do that? And why are they listening, anyway? Can’t they just… walk out?

Then there are the news stories on TV about back-to-school, the article in the paper about the importance of preschool in a child’s later “academic success”, the advertisement on the bus shelter about the failure a person will be if they don’t go to university…

In a hundred different ways or more, day by day, the society around us is telling unschoolers what they’re doing is wrong.

And that’s just unschooling. If you’ve also made other different and radical choices in how you live, if your views on many other things are very different from the dominant culture, it gets even worse.

So how do you navigate in a world where you live so differently from those around you? How do you find and maintain community? How do you deal with the constant pressure to conform to the edicts of the dominant culture? These are questions I think a lot about in my own life, and am continually attempting to answer.

This is part one of our eight-part series, Week of the Idzie. Read the full series here.

This essay originally was part of a keynote speech Idzie gave at the 2011 Toronto Unschooling Conference.