The Best Kind of Bad Influence

“If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it, too?”

We’ve all heard that before, probably multiple times and with multiple landmarks. There were Very Good Reasons for people to protect you from yourself in your formative years even though, at the time, it probably royally pissed you off. However, if your guardians did at least the bare minimum in forming you into a functioning adult, you are now probably able to determine for yourself when free-falling from a point of architectural interest isn’t as dangerous as it seems. You have learned to identify slippery-slope arguments; you know that getting a tattoo will NOT grant you immediate membership to the Hells Angels and turn you into a smoking, swearing, leather-wearing, gun-toting, beard-growing, establishment-disowning maniac on a souped-up Harley. You know that there is no such thing as a special branch of law enforcement known as the ‘Seatbelt Police’, and they are not going to fall from the sky and arrest you for not having your seatbelt buckled before the car is started*. You know that if you keep making that face it won’t stick that way, if you swallow watermelon seeds you won’t grow a watermelon plant in your stomach, and that you really don’t have to wait a full hour to go swimming after you eat.

There was always someone you knew, though, who was a consummate daredevil. That kid who make four-foot bike ramps or jumped off their roof into the swimming pool. The one whose parents left them and their sibling(s) home alone for a whole weekend. The one who always had the best snacks in their lunch at school — the stuff your mom wouldn’t let you have because it was full of sugar and food coloring and lord-knows-what-else and would “rot your teeth out of your head.”

Face it, you were fascinated by that kid. You were fascinated, but you were either too chickenshit or too much of a goody-goody to even try to emulate their devil-may-care lifestyle. (Or your mother had you convinced that that kid was destined for failure/prison/an early death and you were aware that none of those things were pleasant so you steered clear of them.)

Okay, so Mom might have erred an eensy bit the right side of hyperbole. The point is, she was steering you away from a possible bad influence in an effort to shape you into a productive and positive contributor to society, and she probably succeeded…more or less.

But hello, what’s this? Adulthood? I’m free from the statutes of parental law? Oh, fuck yes!

There are people who go off the deep end, it’s true. However, based on the people I’ve met in my adult life, most of us don’t treat grownupdom as our personal bacchanal. I’ve seen some pretty mild rebellions between age eighteen and now — people in my college dorm saying, “I never got to have sugary breakfast cereals, I’m going to eat nothing but them from now on!” or “I’m going to stay up after midnight!” or “I’m going to buy name brand peanut butter!” The beauty of having been protected from the worst bad influences during our childhoods is evident here — cereal, late bedtimes, and slightly more expensive peanut butter aren’t going to do us any irreparable harm, and we know that.

There’s still the slightly more questionable things, though. I mentioned last week that in recent years I have gotten a couple of tattoos and done some weird stuff to my hair. These are things that would never have flown ten years ago, even though I was already out from under the parental wing. It took a little nudging to get me to stop thinking and start doing. I know that this isn’t the same for everyone — maybe for some of you it was trying a new hobby or joining a new club or finally starting that band you’ve always talked about or climbing Half Dome even though your mom always said, “Don’t do that, you’ll break your neck!” I bet most of the impetus for you to finally get off your ass and actually do these things came from you, yourself, but there were things that pushed you toward it without you knowing it. A YouTube video, maybe, or a friend’s friend’s vacation photos on Facebook. A song on the radio. A conversation with a blind date, but even though the date was terrible, the notion stayed with you.

Maybe it was a fortune cookie.

The best kind of bad influences are the ones that add up over time, whispering in your ear, “You know, you could do that if you tried.” They’re the free spirits you meet who you think are kind of cuckoo bananapants, but in the good way. They’re all the little things that make you believe in yourself — make you push yourself.

Or, you know, it’s your hairdresser saying, “Elizabeth, it’s just hair. It’ll grow back.”



*Yes, the Seatbelt Police figured in my childhood, though to be fair, I was the one who was adamant that seatbelts were done up before the car was started because I made up the Seatbelt Police and shut up, I was four.