Nerd alert! – 307.5

By the way, I did finally do my coping tips (or whatever you wish to call them) for the ongoing hard times. I thought that would be a multi-part series, and was not sure when I could possibly get to it, but I ended up doing one post on the preparedness blog, which seemed fitting, and I wanted to fill up one more week before we moved into the regular monthly updates:

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/

After all, if I was the kind of person who could swiftly and efficiently move through everything I want to cover, I would still only have one blog. Right now, this one is for therapy again. Yes, I am once more turning to the past to see where I have gone wrong. Well, maybe I will find some places where I went right, but those will probably seem less significant. Anyway, the last round focused a lot on different boys, and the first round focused on shameful events, and this may be more about identity. Honestly, I’m not sure how it will work out.

I’ll start with a Facebook story though, because that’s always good. There was a note going around where there were various questions you were supposed to answer, and one of the questions was whether you were a nerd in high school. Aaron answered “Weren’t we all?” which was funny because he was the star of the basketball team, such as it was. Even if he’d had a 4.0 GPA, I don’t think he would have been considered a nerd. However, if what he was really saying was that he generally felt like a dork, well, that would be a common viewpoint, because adolescence is rife with insecurity and self-doubt, if not self-loathing, and the popular kids were not immune.

For the same question, I answered, “That was my understanding,” which was pretty noncommittal, but I had considered the question when I was back in school, and I was never clear on the answer then. I did take some flak from one or two of the guys in the group, because they thought that I thought I was better than them, but it was more complicated than that.

So, I have referenced this junior high group before, but I can go over it a bit more clearly. I’m thinking I should leave out names thought. Okay, there were six of us girls. Most of us met in what we called “block” class. That was a two-class block where you did both social studies and English. I have no idea why they put them together, but is was kind of like homeroom in some ways, I guess, because we never had official homeroom classes in junior high or high school. I really liked all of the girls, and am still friends with three of them.

There were also four boys. I did not like the boys for the most part. Actually, that’s not true. There was one that I could see was weird, but he was always nice to me, and we usually got along fine. There was another who was very nice. The other two were jerks, but ultimately, they were all part of the group, and that’s just how it was. Generally we did not have much conflict, except for the manipulative one trying in subtle ways to make you feel like dirt.

That block class that we met in was the advanced one, and we had other advanced classes together, and were generally pretty smart. We were also not particularly popular, though I am starting to realize that “popular” is kind of a floating target. You could disagree on who was popular and who wasn’t, and have completely legitimate arguments on both sides.

Anyway, when this discussion came up, I guess the issue was that I would not fully admit to being a nerd. I’m not sure that I even denied being a nerd, but I would have been uneasy with the title for a few different reasons.

First of all, I knew that I was not as studious as I could be. I slacked off on homework all the time. It was generally so I could read books that interested me, but still, on one level I was not sure if I was really academic enough to be a nerd, and that would actually be an area of feeling inferior.

What bothered me more though, was an attitude that was at least true of these two boys. It could have come across as an attitude of superiority to the rest of the world, though I believe it stemmed largely from jealousy. I think there was some hostility in it, and there was definitely contempt, and if that was what made one a nerd, then I couldn’t be one. I liked the other kids who were not in our group. I liked sports, and television, and rock music. Actually, all of us girls liked popular music for sure—David Bowie, INXS, Duran Duran, The Cure—our favorites were all different, but our tastes overlapped enough that it was not a problem. I could not tell you what music any of the boys liked.

So I guess the reason that I didn’t know if I was a nerd or not, it was them. If all it meant was being smart and not getting asked out on dates, okay, definitely. I was smart—I wouldn’t have gotten so lazy academically if I had not been able to coast so much in grade school. And, well, the social life has been covered extensively in other posts. But if it meant being studious, I wasn’t enough, and if it meant looking out at the world and thinking bad thoughts about everyone else then I didn’t want any part of it anyway.

What we really need to do is to define what makes one a nerd, and maybe in the process of that we should realize that labeling people is stupid, and it’s kind of a false viewpoint anyway. I know we all believed in social stratification, first because of SE Hinton and then John Hughes, but it’s not how it worked out here, and I’m not sure it was that accurate for Tulsa and Chicago either.

I remember talking with my friend Rachel (not in my group, but we went to the same elementary school, and due to boundary changes, that was a small group) once after she had seen The Outsiders, about how you have the Socs, and then it was Stoners and Nerds, I think. But Socs could be divided into Socs and Jocks, I think, depending on if they were athletic or not, and Stoners could be divided into Stoners and Rockers, based on whether they actually did drugs or not, and we realized some people just had to be Normals, because they didn’t fit any of those categories.

I have had people say that The Breakfast Club was just like they remember high school, and I have doubted that, because again, we just did not have these strict social layers, and when I ask follow-up questions, it sort of falls apart, and anyone could talk to anyone or date anyone, even if some pairings were more likely than others. I do know people who were tormented, but that generally seems to have been more within groups than between groups.

I think these things ring true emotionally because of the dissatisfaction with our selves that we tend to feel. We certainly wish we were cooler, and other people seem to have achieved that. Or we wish we could be close to one person, and we see other people who are, so they seem popular. What we don’t know is that most of them are feeling the same emotions, even if it is for different reasons.

The big lesson for me of the last years is that truth is the most important thing. Being open and honest, but also working to see accurately. Well, kindness is really important too, and becomes more necessary the more open we are, but still, it seems like the majority of our pain comes from what we hide and where we are blind.