Essay On Being An Outsider

Freshman year, I was painfully shy and I built a persona of a tortured artist to cope with the fact that I felt weird and ostracized. Being an outsider feels better when it’s a choice, and it was easy to make myself feel special when what everyone else was talking about just didn’t “speak to me.” Art has always been important to me, but while wallowing in the teen angst, I expected that one must suffer to be considered a true artist. In cultivating that image, I reacted to what should have been a wonderful time—homecoming, pep rallies—with bitter suppression. From the life trajectory of legends like Vincent van Gogh, I deduced that the price to pay for artistic brilliance was an existence of misery. And I expected that true artistry required one to make that misery publicly evident, especially in one’s work. …show more content…
A devoted watcher of Korean soap operas, I happened to click on a suggested video. I had discovered k-pop, short for the popular music that dominates the Korean entertainment industry. I was in love—my budding hormones were grudgingly but ardently ignited by their flaming charisma and brightness.
At first, I felt guilty and self-consciousness about liking k-pop, a result of prejudices against the industry inherent from my compulsion towards purity in art, a preoccupation with being “real.” Essentially sold as a product to a fan-base of teenage girls, k-pop, like western boy-bands, is often perceived as artificial and manufactured. Attempting to reconcile my enthusiastic presence in the k-pop fan community with my artistic identity, I constantly probed for the suffering beneath any crack that might appear under the veneer of pop-star