Ash | Blenheim, Marlborough

“This area especially, everybody’s really different. So, you meet heaps of different people every day. Different ethnicities, cultures, beliefs, all that sort of stuff.

One of my managers I get along really well with, she’s completely different. Most of  my friends have the same sort of lifestyle as me, and all that and I haven’t gotten to know anybody super-different than me, besides people who have come from really different backgrounds, different stories in their life. Everybody’s different, daily I’m meeting people who are different, and seeing everybody from different areas of the world, and life.

It’s definitely important, because you’ll meet people who have different stories, learn stuff about other cultures or people’s backstories and find out the sort of stuff they’ve gone through and what they’ve dealt with. How things work, where they’re from, all that sort of stuff. Learning different things about everything daily. 

I am pretty different, I guess. I’m not really sure why I went with this whole thing, but I kind of had this look. This is the style that I like, and I like being different and not blending in with everybody else. I thought it could be fun, and then I’ve been having dyed hair and all that since I was probably around 10.

I guess it’s just a way of standing out and it’s showing that I’m not just basic and generic. I’m not here to fit in. I’m here to do my own thing, and be my own person and not follow what everybody else does. I’ve always grown up, until the last few years, really sheltered, and most of my family was really conservative. It was always plain, boring, black and white, I never got to do anything interesting, and I got bored of that. I’d see people in public with really cool outfits, or bright hair, and I’d be like, they know what they’re doing. They’re not fitting in with everybody else. They’re being their own person. I thought that was really cool, and thought I’d try it out.

I’ve connected with a fair few people who are really different. I’m not that close to many of them, because I’m not close to many people. I’d say me and my step-dad are quite different. He’s still really sheltered and conservative. Everything’s plain, black and boring, but most of the time we get along quite well. So, he puts up with me being myself, and I put up with him being, black and white. I get along well with him, and we’re pretty much the complete opposite person. But he’s an awesome person, and I love him a lot, but he is quite old-fashioned, he’ll put up with me being myself but we’re pretty much complete polar opposites.

I was born in Christchurch, moved to Blenheim when I was around eight, because our house sold down there, and then we were going to move up to Wellington, but then came through Blenheim, and my parents were like, oh you know, let’s just stay here for a bit, and we’ve been here ever since. I got into some troublesome background about a year back, and I started going down a really dark path, and doing stuff I shouldn’t have been, and then my parents had decided that they didn’t have enough so they sent me to live with my biological father in Australia. Things got really dark over there, and I went into a really bad place, and then I came back and lost $500 worth of stuff. I came back completely a different person. I’m doing a lot better now, trying to sort my life out, get back on track.”