Fitting in

One of the nice things about being old and out of school and not even having kids in school, is not having to care if I am liked or not. It has been years since I worried about if I was going to be rejected. I don’t know. I have a comfortable friend base and I’m fairly confident I can make friends easy enough.

That is until recently. When I was a kid we moved a lot. My dad’s career path involved a fair amount of transfers, so I found myself as the new kid at a new school in a completely new town enough times to recall that feeling easily. It didn’t help that I had a terrible sense of direction.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood lost. which is a little like how I feel on instagram. As a new kid, I didn’t ‘get’ things about the new school, sometimes, for weeks. Teachers cared about different things, Basic subjects were taught differently, desks were different, kids were different, lunch was different, recess was a nightmare. Even ‘cool’ was redefined in every new place. Always there was a core group who led the pack and just seemed to effortlessly confidently crack the like-ability code, or maybe they wrote it.

I haven’t lost my school girl admiration for whatever that quality or mastery is. One thing I remember is that making friends in our neighborhoods was way easier. School had so many rules or norms or things you had to understand. Kind of like hashtags and algorithms. No one in the neighborhoods seemed to care about what was trending, we just made up what we wanted to be into. If I stumbled into a school and managed to figure it out quickly enough, I made friends, if not, I just had to hang in there until the next move At least I had friends in the neighborhood .

I didn’t come away from any of this with good skills or even enough experience to help me out in adulthood, (or Facebook , clearly) It’s possible I have the tiniest bit of PTSD instead. I’m fine now, or at least I was, but my present baffling experiences with social media has me wondering.

Do I HAVE to do this? Is there no other way?

Once, I moved to a new school and was asigned a very strict teacher. On one of my first days, as I was scrambling to get an assignment right, my pencil lead broke. I needed to sharpen it to continue working. The teacher had left the room and when she came back, many hands went up. Apparently there was a rule about getting out of your seat when the teacher left the room (even to sharpen your pencil) and apparently these new kids enjoyed ratting me out. The new teacher showed no mercy, she gave me, shy new kid that I was, a punishment I had never heard of before. I had to copy dictionary pages. The kids seemed oddly glad. There I was thinking I was doing the right thing, only to find out I was not. I had trouble fitting in at that school, it wasn’t a good fit for me. It might be that social media and I are not a good fit either.

I didn’t get to choose if I wanted to quit school in the fifth grade. I wonder if it’s not optional to quit trying to do Instagram or Facebook if I want to get a book or an idea out into the world either…