I’ve felt unmotivated to write lately, which could be a good thing. It might mean my brain has been a bit not peaceful lately. I’ve been slowly working on a different piece, a somewhat meditative one, and I should really finish it first, but right now I feel like whining to my internet pen-pal instead.
When I was in seventh grade, three of my classmates (all of my classmates; private rural Christian school) planned a party in front of me, to which I was not invited. My teacher (my mom) found out, and the administrator found out, and as a result, my classmates got a talking-to about bullying and kindness and loving your neighbor and whatnot. Consequently, I was apologized to, invited to the party, and put in an uncomfortable position. If I didn’t go, it would seem as though I didn’t really accept the olive branch, and I was being resentful. If I did go, I would know I wasn’t really wanted there.
I went, and had a pretty fun time, but any enjoyment was necessarily tempered by the knowledge that I wasn’t truly part of the in-group, and my allowed presence was only a courtesy. Oof.
Four years later, my high school had the opportunity to attend a conference that would have a performance by an honor choir made up of students from various schools. I spent many hours practicing, both by myself and in one-on-one sessions with my choir director, and we took multiple recordings of the audition to get the best one possible. My hard work and dedication paid off when I got the email saying, “Congratulations!” and welcoming me into the honor choir. But then as my eyes ran down the list of names, seeing all my friends’ but not my own, the follow-up email came through.
“Psych! Gotcha. Haha, you really thought you got in, loser? LMAOOOO!!!”
Not really. But there was an email saying there’d been a glitch in their system, and the acceptance email had been sent by mistake. Cue “Fix You” by Coldplay. When you try your best, but you don’t succeed. . . I got a free vocal lesson as an apology, though it wasn’t really enough to make up for the week that summer when one of my best friends was ghosting me, and the other was on the trip I didn’t get to participate in, so I was alone and wallowing in the heat and misery of July. Nor did it make up for the fact that that trip seemed to be the only thing a few of my friends could talk about for roughly four years afterward. Or all the comments of “And it wasn’t even hard to get in!” I got to overhear, from people who practiced the music once and got in. Speak for yourself, man. Some of us suck at doing stuff. (I do think some of that particular sentiment comes from said commenters being men. There was far less competition for the bass and tenor slots. Still, it didn’t feel awesome to hear that.) To this day, I’m pretty sure any conversation with a certain classmate that lasts more than fifteen minutes will eventually turn back to the honor choir trip. I’m bitter, but at least I get the satisfaction of not having peaked in high school. Kindergarten is where I really shone. When I occasionally dwell on it, Dwight Schrute appears with his words of wisdom.
My childhood and adolescence were colored by the feeling of not quite belonging. I didn’t like my Sunday school at church, preferring to sit in on my parents’ class instead. In both middle and high school, it seemed the friend groups were “volleyball girls, basketball boys, other,” so I was in “other” by default, not necessarily by choice, and I didn’t always feel assimilated. It must be noted, however, that in high school, we “other” adopted one volleyball girl and one basketball boy, who became my two best friends, and one of whom I married.
At seventeen, I became close friends with a twenty-eight-year-old mom of four. By most metrics, we had little in common, but I hung out with her on my days off, and she’s still one of my best friends. Currently, I’m better friends with the parents of most of my high school friends than I am with them. At my former job, the conversations that drew my attention were those happening in any department but my own, often among men. It seems like everywhere, the place I want to be is outside the bounds of social norms, whether by age or gender or life stage. Sometimes it can work for a while.
When I was a near-adult, I’d hang out with my parents’ small group of all middle-aged or senior married folks. It was all fun and games, all “You’re so mature for your age, you have great insights,” until I passionately confronted the vehement, violent hatred of gay people expressed by one of the members. Then the ruse was dismantled, and the statuses were made clear: fifty-something man (smart, respectable, authoritative), teenage girl (foolish, negligible, impertinent). I could play at grown-up, and the real ones would play along, until I had the opinions and gumption of one. Then it wasn’t fun anymore, and it was time to sit down and shut up.
It’s not helped by my doing things outside the normal timeline. I got married at nineteen, and have two kids at twenty-three. Everyone new my husband and I meet assumes we’re half a decade older than we are. Our weirdness is reflected in our peers, too. The ones our age are just now starting to have serious relationships and getting married. The ones in our life stage are in a completely different generation. The strange combination of being young and doing older person things, again, leads to not really fitting in anywhere.
Our church is small, and I know it’s a tough place to be a young, single person. It’s also a tough place to be old. The majority of congregants are middle aged empty nesters, middle-aged/youngish parents, and kids. But I find it’s also tough to be a person who’s taken a differently-ordered or differently-timed life path than others. I want to be friends with the people near my age, but we’re in such drastically different stages that feels impossible. The mundanity and limited nature of my life is boring and restrictive, and worst of all, uncool, to would-be young companions. I want to be friends with the people in a similar life stage, but they all grew up together and have decades of history, inside jokes, and relationship dynamics, and it’s hard to break into that as a newcomer.
I’ve felt that outsider-ness most recently when hanging out with friends (the “older-but-same-life-stage” crew), where five different families we’d consider close have planned multiple group trips together this year, to which we haven’t been invited. In a deja-vu state, I’ve listened to the plans being made, the memories being recounted, and I’ve felt twelve years old again, sixteen years old again. I guess I thought that stuff wouldn’t happen when I was an adult. Adults are more mindful of how their actions affect others, right? They’re more considerate than middle schoolers, than high schoolers.
I know it isn’t malicious, but neither were the times from my youth, and they hurt all the same. It’s left my brain ping-ponging between “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you seem to fit in anywhere?” and “You’re such a baby for being upset by this. Why are you upset about something so trivial? You should have grown up by now, yet here you are, thinking and feeling the same way you did as a teen.”
I think it’s in everyone’s nature to think their struggles are unique to them, and I think that notion is usually wrong. But I really wonder, does everyone feel like this? Does everyone feel like they can’t quite manage to fully belong in a group? Like there’s something they’re unaware of weakly repelling people away? I don’t think I’m alone or unique in this experience, but I would also be a little surprised if it’s totally universal.
I recently watched a video essay entitled, “Why are people so weird about only children?” It brought me a lot of comfort. Many only children shared that they were lonely as kids, and while it’s a sad picture, it’s nice to know that that, at least, is a normal thing about me. Only children were shown to be less agreeable to their peers, but were more adaptable, and higher performing academically. This, too, is fitting. Maybe I traded popularity for straight A’s, and I like the thought that I’m adaptable. There is little to no evidence that only children are more selfish, especially beyond childhood, so maybe we can finally ditch that stereotype. At my old job, of a certain salesman’s quirks of operation, my boss would say, “I think it’s because he’s an only child and grew up spoiled.” It always irked me, for one thing because I liked this salesman and didn’t find him particularly difficult, but also because she was almost saying, “He’s an only child, and that turns people into whiny, demanding man-babies” to me, an only child.
Another thing spoken of in the video is the difficulty of found family as opposed to built-in family, and how siblings say that no one will ever know them as well or have a similar relationship to them as their siblings, and this is largely true. A silver lining of it all, though, is that only children are found to be much closer to their parents than children with siblings. Anecdotally, this aligns with my experience. I’ve heard multiple friends (all with siblings) talk about how they love their moms, but they find them extremely annoying and cringey, and they can only handle so much of them. These friends all relate to one another in this, but I genuinely cannot. My mom is one of my best friends, and my love for and enjoyment of her has no caveats. Perhaps I can never fully grasp the sibling relationship, but my friends with siblings may never grasp the only-child/mother relationship.
Another video essay I watched recently was about the show Malcolm in the Middle. I’ve watched the entirety of this show probably near a dozen times, as a kid and as an adult, and my family quotes it often. My appreciation for it has only grown. This may seem ironic, as it follows a family of six (later seven), and I just talked about my experience as an only child. What could I understand of the subject matter? I didn’t expect to tear up at a video about such a silly show, but I did. It shouldn’t have surprised me, as I often tear up at the show itself. Notable cry-worthy scenes are the end of the episode “Lois’ Birthday,” the epic golf cart ride in “Family Reunion,” the “Of course I love you more” dialogue in “Cynthia’s Back,” and the pregnancy montage in “Grandma Sues.” It’s the dumbest show in the world to cry at, but the family’s wildly dysfunctional love for each other, especially between Lois and Hal, despite the unfairness of life (the whole point), is extremely touching. The video I watched about this show focused on the family’s financial situation, and how, unlike other sitcoms of the era such as Friends or Gilmore Girls, the characters who were described as broke actually were. Despite this, the video creator says, the money situation never makes it into the marriage, which is why Lois and Hal are so happy together, even when everything around is falling apart.
I guess I don’t really have a point to all this, other than: it’s the same old junk in life all the time, looks like, and I’m grateful for the unconditional friendship of my husband and my mom.
I tried to watch Halloweentown yesterday, and it was so incredibly boring that during the movie, I was scrolling Letterboxd to find the funniest reviews of the movie. My belief that everything the Disney Channel has created is pure slop was further cemented. One of the reviews read, “I think whoever was in charge of makeup did their best! But sometimes that’s not enough.💔” And in my household, we don’t really believe in “It’s not that deep” as a concept, so my husband said, “Isn’t it crazy that in the new creation, when you try your best it will always be enough? When you do your best, you’ll always succeed. That’s going to be amazing.” So I guess in my wallowing in how Out Of Place™ I am, and how I Don’t Belong™, I’ll try to remember that someday, Coldplay’s “Fix You” will be irrelevant.
In the meantime, here’s a song recommendation to add to your whiteboard list, just because it’s in my head: https://youtu.be/3HUvGvHocBQ?si=fxDzhj2UsYhKv5Ur
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