I don't think it was something that changed in terms of how I felt, but more the ways I saw nonconformity operating in practice.
-nonconformists need a foil, so they set up a conformist opponent. Invariably, the conformists they imagine are two-dimensional characters who do things without thinking and only because "that's the way they've always been done." In order for a nonconformist to feel a sense of identity, they need to see the majority as part of this thoughtless herd, and themselves as standing out from the crowd.
-nonconformists often overestimate their intellect or their moral/ethical correctness. Imagine a job in which you have to make a decision. You believe one thing, while everyone else in the organization believes another. Absent all other evidence, wouldn't a person who kept their own abilities in perspective assume the error in judgment was their own and not everyone else's? But right now, the pendulum is so far in the other direction, that we make heroes out of the individual who holds strong to their original choice. We only hear about those stories when the individual is correct, and not in the more likely scenario in which the majority was correct, and the individual wrong.
On a personal note, I was always told to follow my own path. But the truth is that the things about me that were considered "different" weren't just different - they were shortcomings. For instance, I was always disorganized as a child. Rather than people telling me I was lazy, I was told that my mind just works differently. I'm now 30 years old, and I'm still disorganized. I no longer believe that it's my mind working differently than others - I believe that I should have been expected to conform to the basic level of order that others use. I should have been told that an objective standard does in fact exist, and that I wasn't special enough to fall outside of that standard.
Societies have broadly shared standards of conduct. What's wrong with deferring to those when possible, and following a different way when necessary?