The joys and sorrows of being a misfit

As I’ve mentioned I recently went to my high school reunion. So did a friend of mine, who also went to a North Shore private girls school. Here’s how she described her experience, which was very similar to mine:

I paid a fair bit to attend and afterwards thought it was a complete waste of money. It felt voyeuristic, but completely disappointing in the end. Face it - the real reason I’d gone was to see what kind of freaks our school had churned out. Unfortunately, there was no one who fitted in the freak, or even interesting category.

It affirmed for me why I’m friends with the people I’m friends with and after 10 years I could look at everyone with a more critical eye. Those cool girls in high school, the ones who made me feel unpopular, or the good girls who had that glow of perfection that I knew I could never achieve aren’t so cool or perfect after all (in fact a lot of them had heavily caked-on foundation, that in the heat of the day was not so attractive).

There were plenty of bankers, teachers and lawyers, a handful of dentists, physios, doctors etc. The typical white collar jobs. Everyone looked so sanitised and North Shore. Some people were married, some had kids or were pregnant, some were house hunting … Nothing out of this world.

It made me realise how banal humans can be. Which sounds depressing but is actually very motivating, since it makes me want to break out. As people who are living in or have lived in a different country we have a wider perspective on what’s going on and what matters. That’s not to make us sound more knowledgeable or wise but the reason most of my closest friends have lived in or are living in foreign cultures is because we know distance isn’t a barrier and the world is bigger than the North Shore/Shire.

In our private all-girls school world, maybe we didn’t fit in and maybe I’ll never fit in. But I’m actually glad I don’t. I was talking to a friend about how we were made to feel different and uncool but now that we’ve been out of that highly constructed, artificial world for over ten years, I can see that that wasn’t reality. Reality is weird, interesting, engaging, three things I definitely didn’t feel at the reunion.

So in the end, I was glad I’d gone to the reunion, if only to affirm my choices of the past decade. I wouldn’t trade my last ten years for ten years living on the North Shore, looking for a flat, having a mortgage, working in a corporate job and meeting up every week with the same friends from high school.

On a related note, do read my friend Rachel’s excellent post looking at why those who were unpopular in high school go on to become the world’s leaders and innovators. And not the usual reason we hear of underdog beginnings spurring ambitious nerds to succeed, but because the weird kids - by nature of being outside them - were forced to become aware of society’s norms. And thus know how to change them.

Here’s an excerpt below but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

rachelhills:

Lyn Worsley’s comments also seemed to connect to this post by Penelope Trunk, about “thinking outside the box”:

People who are truly weird spend lots of time trying to figure out how to fit in. Not fitting in is a luxury for in-the-box thinkers. (This is why, by the way, I think the popular kids in school do not make all the money after graduation. Generally, people get paid a lot because they’re different, but high school popularity rewards people who are the same.)

The thing about thinking out of the box is you have to know where the box is. People think my talent is thinking out of the box. But that’s not it—my talent is finding the box, defining it. I am great at studying the rules. I love rules. The rules are what the box is made of. So here’s a rule: it’s not out of the box if it’s not in the vicinity of the box.

…

It takes tremendous expertise in order to get out of the box. You have to have years thinking about the box, and watching people put things in, and then you have to have an idea that you recognize as fitting near the box but not in it. (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers, says this process takes 10,000 hours.)”