The Outsider

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

I noticed certain groups and cliques in high school. Kids banded together based on tribe, race, and popularity. This trend started in late primary school but the bonds solidified in high school. I think for the most part, I was usually an outsider because I would only be in a school for less than a year (I was always moving to new cities and countries) and never shared the same history and inside jokes with my fellow classmates. I used to switch back and forth between groups of friends. I never liked to belong to only one group. I think I was happy to not get caught up in the drama that went on in each group. Thankfully, being an outsider, I never had enough emotional investment to be included in the drama. I always found the high school spectacle of popularity contest and gossip to be overrated, to say the least. I noticed some kids would band with certain groups just to prevent themselves from falling to the bottom of the social food chain. Let’s face it. Who wants to be the freak sitting alone in the corner of the lunch room? And when I say freak, I mean the kid who doesn’t appear to have any allies or belong to any tribe, thus, in the theatre of war that is high school, is considered no other than a freak. I may have been considered an outsider, but never an outcast. I much preferred to have close friendships with a couple of people. Looking back, I realize in each school I had one or two best friends, but never a small group of friends I could call my group. Even though I have a group from grade 11/12 high school in Canada, I’ve still never felt a huge bond with that group. I’ve continued to make new friends through work and Uni. I think whenever I hang out with that high school group in the group environment – when we’re all in attendance – it feels almost ritualistic and somewhat formal. I’m probably not making sense. I just find I won’t have a real conversation with them in the group environment because our dialogue merely consists of inside jokes and social pleasantries like “How have you been? What’s new?” interspersed with counterfeit laughter. I’ve never been one for small talk. I’d rather stick my head in an oven a la Sylvia Plath. But whenever I’m spending time with one of my friends from that group, one on one, I find the conversation to be much more enjoyable. In an earlier post I likened myself to the stubborn black sheep of the herd, but I think it would also be accurate to say I’m the lone wolf out of the pack. The outsider. The loner. Am I a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

Black Sheep

I have an odd thing against fads. In fact, I can be so stubborn that I’ll refuse to listen/read/do certain things when it seems everyone is following a fad. I still haven’t read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code because I didn’t like how everyone was gushing over it. My friends in high school kept saying I “had to” read this book. I didn’t like that. It took me 7 years before I watched the Titanic movie. I used to think those Affliction shirts were cool when I saw MMA fighters wearing them, but I don’t like how it seems every tool in the lower mainland is now wearing them. I’m not sure why I don’t like fads. I just don’t like following what everyone else is doing.

I wasn’t always this way. I have this stubborn tendency to be the black sheep in the herd but I can’t pinpoint when this started. I’m not sure if it is my innate personality, but I have a feeling it was passed from my Dad and Stepmum. I always heard things like “Why would you want to be normal?” or “Normal is boring. Be different” or “Stop thinking what others are thinking and do what you want.” For a while I used to be quite frustrated with my parents for always being so different from my friends’ parents. For a start, why on earth did we have to move so much? Ever since an early age, I was never in the same school for more than a year before we jumped to a different city and/or country. I started thinking we more closely resembled a pack of Gypsies than a normal family. I longed for normality, consistency, monotony, suburbia, pop tarts, junk food, white bread, brand name clothes, MTV, and Nintendo. Instead, I was told POP tarts weren’t real food; if I were to eat instant noodles, I’d have to replace the brain cancer seasoning packets with soy sauce; if I was hungry then have some fruit; MTV was trash; video games thwart creativity; if I was bored then read a book; wearing Nike meant supporting child labour. Needless to say, I only ate brown bread, brown rice, absolutely no junk food, and having a soda was considered a treat. The idea of entertainment was considered listening to music and drawing in my room. Going out to a restaurant for dinner was unheard of. Watching TV while eating dinner was out of the question. If I ever got into trouble, my parents never ‘grounded’ me because they considered it a useless form of punishment. Instead, they just gave me more chores to do. I was always ashamed as a kid for not being ‘normal’ or not fitting in with the rest. I was very self conscious of the fact I never wore the ‘cool’ clothes other kids wore. Maybe the instability of continuously moving to new places and never knowing how long it would be until the next move made me long for what I saw as comfort, safety, predictability and consistency in other kids’ families.

I’m rambling. 

What am I getting at here? Hmm… I’m lost… I started out explaining why as a kid I always wanted to fit in but ended up rambling on about my insignificant childhood. I guess I should just finish this train of thought by saying that in recent years, despite my former tendency to conform and seek acceptance, I now catch myself saying or thinking things I heard my parents say to me when I was younger. I guess their years of unconventional parenting somehow got through to me. I now find myself reluctant to wear what everyone else is wearing, avoid wearing brand names for the sake of showing off the brand name itself, wary of books that everyone says I must read, and hesitant of doing something just because everyone else is doing it. I hope I don’t come across as a pretentious snob, which I’m sure I do. I hope that sharing my childhood experiences made sense of some of my disdain for fads. But if it didn’t, I’m not surprised, because even I can’t make sense of my childhood.