Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If a [person] loses pace with his [her] companions, perhaps it is because he [she] hears a different drummer. Let him [her] step to the music which he [she] hears, however measured or far away.“
In my experience, the issue / challenge / quest is not just marching to a different drummer, but actually being that drummer beating out your life’s own rhythm as you are living it, without any preconceptions or concerns as to how a rhythm “should” sound according to conventional or contrarian standards of the era in which you live.
For anyone reading this who feels the calling to be her / his own drummer (and there is no greater calling, I think), what I wish to say “about” myself is that I have successfully lived and worked as an “indie” before the word was as popular or as comprehensive as it is now.
Being an indie is not easy, but life’s march is not easy – for anyone – so all the more reason to march to one’s own rhythm as opposed to marching with the army of populace, which historically seems to offer only two choices of percussion: that of conformist conformity and that of nonconformist conformity. What if a person cannot march to either beat? The answer is to desert the army, lawfully and as politely as possible.
The path of independence, in attitude, if nothing else, at least allows freedom itself to serve as one’s primary restriction.