(More) Ponderings and Encouraging Words to an Ex-Classmate

I recently reconnected with an old school acquaintance via Facebook.  (If you’re reading this, you know who you are and I hope you don’t mind me writing about you but anyone can tell you that when you’re in my life, you’re inevitably blog fodder.)  To say that we were friends back then would be a stretch.  We weren’t at all.  I was sort of…well I didn’t fall into any category that I can remember.  I wasn’t smart enough to be a total geek and although I loved me some Star Wars, I couldn’t spit out trivia even if you held a light saber to my jugular.  I most certainly wasn’t popular or amongst the ‘It’ crowd.  Jocks looked above and past me as well.  Indian kids just weren’t popular back then, we were anomalies that most stared at and asked dumb questions such as “do you always eat curry at home?”, ignoring the fact that you were almost as American as themselves.  I was in the band (which wasn’t a stigma in my high school) but also the editor of the literary magazine (this gave me the aura of being way smarter than I really was…I was just a good writer…hmm…go figure, right?).  I had friends from all the referenced groups above yet not a part of any. They would acknowledge me with brief smiles or a nod in the halls but otherwise there was no invitation to join their lunch table or even to go get a Slurpee with them.  Now that I think of it, no wonder I had such a huge honking identity crisis. 

As for him, my long lost school mate, he was a nerd.  I’m not saying this, I can’t recall enough to say this, he told me.  I have vague memories of him of course but not enough to label him.  In the midst of catching up, I asked him how much we communicated for I didn’t think we talked hardly at all.  Turns out I was right; he confirmed that we were more like ‘hi’ and ‘hello’ friends.  For an instant there after he said this every single horrible high school movie came popping into my cranium regarding bullying and snubbing.  With trepidation I asked whether I was at least nice with my hellos.  I’m epically relieved to be able to report back that yes, indeed I had been nice.  Phew.  I don’t know if I could live with myself knowing I was unnecessarily mean to anyone.  Now if you piss me off, that’s a whole other story.

During the course of this first conversation, with a guy I hadn’t seen in nearly 25 years, I took a peak at his profile, pictures, etc. trying to get an idea of who he was for in fact no matter how I tried to wrack my memory, nothing was coming up, not even a slight recognition.  The first few pictures flew by with nary a glimmer until lo and behold there he was, 9^th grade school shoot and *tubelight*.  Oh yea, I remember…wait…that’s him?!?!?! Indeed he is not a nerd anymore that much I can say. But I realized just how deeply imbedded in ones psyche our past can be, particularly those defining years when most people are just trying to understand who they are.  And this is how I knew: after a few more conversations, it was clear to me that he actually believed that he was still that nerd, that weird awkward gangly kid who was barely noticed, sporting big glasses and who sat quiet with his head down that nearly every girl looked right through.  (Later on, after having attended some religious institution for a few years, he had resurfaced at our high school as a “Goth”…weird but true.)

Anyhoo…it’s not like I haven’t written about how clearly the adult that I’ve become has been shaped by the experiences of my youth.  Every single moment of my past has made me the woman I am today; whether that’s a good thing or bad thing someone else can tell me.  But maybe during all this introspection I never thought that so many others around me have gone through the same thing.  This guy, let’s call him Mr. X, drove this point home without even trying.

After so many years, I finally learned who he was, the things he suffered through our matriculating years and was astonished to learn how many things we had in common.  It wasn’t just about the normal growing pains of life, I mean those are there.  These were rather a more ‘this was what happened and this is the outcome of it so many years later’.

So I sat about pondering this for a while.  Pondering for me often means a blog since it’s my only way to get it all out into some semblance of order in my brain.  If there’s a question attached however the answers do not always reveal themselves to me but at least the question is out there floating around in cyberspace somewhere so if anyone ever feels the urge to respond, they can (mostly they don’t).  What was it that I was contemplating?  Well, I mean so here’s this guy, smart, witty, good looking, sensitive, blah blah blah, all those good things.  He’s also found true love (after a few bad ones on the way) and clearly ready for the next phase of life bar a few situations that need to be taken care of but otherwise, not bad, right?

Funny thing about smoke and mirrors though…they are just that, smoke and mirrors, an illusion.   Because upon further inspection I realized that he’s actually very self-conscious with low self-esteem and he wears sarcasm and a biting sense of humor as a shield.  He feels the need to be a jokester, laughing at himself before anyone can laugh at him, basically self-deprecating at every turn.  I observed all this without pointing it out the first few times we spoke, stunned actually, but eventually I had to ask, and since I’m not shy in my endeavor to understand human behavior, I did so without fear.  Why did he feel as if he had to constantly ‘entertain’ those about him?  Why did he put on a façade of ‘bad ass’ when there were glimmers of the intelligent sensitive man that was lurking beneath?  The first time I asked him all this, bluntly so in fact, he seemed taken aback.  And then I guess he started to ponder too.  This is always a good thing if you ask me, tough but good.

With time all his past came spilling out like water from a faucet, first slow than gaining velocity.  I wondered at one point whether no one had ever bothered to question him, or beyond that take a deeper delve into the person himself.  What sadness was he hiding beneath the joviality, this particular bad ass persona?  The bigger question was, how had no one asked?  What was wrong with those who surrounded him or possibly was he that good of an actor?  These things I didn’t ask for to me they seemed too personal.  As it was, I was toeing a dangerous line of curious to downright nosy.

His words though somehow reverberated deep within, the little girl inside started to live through childhood while he typed.  At first it was just in the effort to find the connection between him and me.  How did I know him, did we ever speak, did we have mutual friends?  Yes, I knew him (by face alone), we barely spoke (as I mentioned above), yes, we had communal friends but never hung out.  He was as different and distant from me than the moon itself.  Yet our struggles were so comparable: the unacceptance from our counter-parts, being an outcast, never quite finding the right footing, always feeling as if you were looking in to a party where everyone was having a good time but you couldn’t gain entrance…the sad list went on. 

Do these things sound somewhat familiar, not even a slight bit out of the ordinary to you, my reader?  However, while most may have grown out these feelings, found their own identity, able to get a good foothold in adulthood and let the insecure kids within themselves leech out with time.  Maybe…some of us didn’t, shockingly enough.

Mr. X talked and I listened.  His whole life, from school on, had been shaped by those years.  Those experiences had rooted themselves snuggly within and had never let go, not really, not that I could see.  The insecurities, the agonies, the anguishes adhered to him like cling wrap no matter how he had been able to transform his outer self which without question he had done and successfully so.  It was almost painful to listen to him yet I so could sympathize.  Like him my childhood had been full of such self-doubt and gracelessness.  In one of my first blogs I spoke about that girl, the one I had been.  She was small, ignored and indeed foreign.  She wasn’t allowed to date, hang out with boys, wear make-up or go to sleepovers nor do any of the things that defined youth in the USA.   She probably smelled slightly of spices, her hair was a poof-y, frizzy mess, she wore clothes picked out by her mother (which she thought was cool) and she sometimes even wore strange cultural outfits to school not for an instant thinking that she would get weird looks.  She knew though that she didn’t fit in.   She was diminished in her existence during the first 8 years of schooling and into high school she just retreated, sticking closely to a few close companions. 

Boys never asked her out, they knew it would be ‘no, I’m not allowed to date’ and she was pretty sure there wasn’t a soul who felt the compulsion to ask anyhow.  She kept her head down; when she looked up she frowned, only assaulted her friends with witty humor or her ‘real self’ otherwise becoming tongue-tied in front of everyone else and secretly yearned that she would end up being a Molly Ringwald character where at the end the most popular guy in school would fall in love with her (hello reference to Sixteen Candles).  Not so much.

By college the tides had turned but not totally.  She still wasn’t partying, still wasn’t dating, still couldn’t look any guy she found attractive straight in the eyes but she was more apt to speak up.  She honed the sarcasm and intellect.  She figured if they wouldn’t notice her looks, they would damn well take note of the other things.  Every step since then had been integrated with the singular intent upon sharpening those tools in her arsenal: wit, sarcasm, a self-deprecating quick as lightening sense of humor that got her noticed (and sometimes admired).  All those things that Mr. X mentioned, ‘she’ did too.

Even as I sit here today, after having brought up this topic to my colleagues during lunch, I realize it isn’t me or him.  It’s all of us.  All those seemingly insignificant experiences at the blush of first youth actually have a deeper impact within our psychosis whether we realize it or not.  The lucky ones overcome while a very wretched bunch of us misfits grow up with all these negative apprehensive monsters still speaking softly into our ears, jeering, condescending, intimidating.  “You will never be as pretty as…”  “You will always fail to fit in so stop…”  “No one likes you, they just put up with you…” “Why did you think that was funny?”  “You are a loser, don’t even try to…” 

Don’t read this feeling bad for me or Mr. X for that matter, that wasn’t the intention behind this blog at all.  We’ll get our crap together one day (InshAllah).  May be neither of us have achieved what we wished, haven’t realized our dreams but then again how many have?  That’s okay though, we have time hopefully.  I believe though that what we have been able to actually do while fighting these stigmas and demons is develop a sense of compassion for others.  People like us automatically root for the underdog, we just can’t help it, and we have to be honest.  Solidarity brotha and sistah!  We secretly (as well as ‘in your face’) cheer on the nerd/geek/introverted/homely/dorky/unaccepted individuals of the world to success.  We want them to win because that’s somehow a win for us…or at least that’s how I am.  I don’t know fully about him but I get the sense that he has been able to maintain the ability to give love, take love.  That wasn’t broken within him although the ability to accept it is more of a struggle.  He looks down upon himself while raising his friends/loved ones to above the stars if not higher.  He takes failure personally, to the point where he will agonize over it.  As he said to me “I hold myself up to higher standards than others”.  Phew.  May be I do that also?  Not sure.  But gosh how harsh, no?  Motivating yourself to be ‘better’ is admirable however we are human and bound to fail and Mr. X and his ilk, I think, crumble under the defeat.  He has to learn that failure is…well…’okay’.  I don’t think he gets that.  I pray that one day he will.

As for me, I think I’m still slaying my own dragons…actually I know I am…from my youth.  They (and yes I mean to write that in the plural) are always lurking in a dark cave creeping out in the middle of the night to grumble out the anxieties that live with them.  They remind me of not being worthy, fooling myself into believing I am less than what I truly am.  That the adult woman I have become is still in many ways the little girl I had been.  But you know what, Folks?  Those damn dragons are wrong.  I am not the same person.  I’m far from being her and although I love her for being who she was because she helped me morph into the person I am today, she can go away for good.  I sound pretty bad ass right now, don’t I?  Well I’m not and I assure you I have a long way to go before she disappears completely.  Does this make her my biggest dragon?  Hmm… 

Is there a moral, a lesson to be learned from to all this?  Yes, I think so.  You know when your kid comes and moans out to you in dramatic tones about what ‘so and so’ did to her/him in school or what ‘such and such’ said to her/him during…well, whenever…, pay attention.  Don’t roll your eyes to the side and say ‘mhmmm, sure honey, okay, oh that’s too bad’ while ironing or reading a brief for work without really listening.  LISTEN.  These times are the most important of their lives.  These moments are those that determine the type of person they will be and possibly these exact experiences will morph into the ‘dragons’ that they will try to slay for the rest of their existence, most likely while you don’t even realize it.  Recall what you were like then, put yourself in their shoes, pause or better yet stop.  Put down the knife in which you were cutting the carrots, close the lid to the computer, may be even turn off the news, turn to your kid and say ‘okay wait, what happened?’. 

Mind you, my parents didn’t lack the sympathy when I told them of my problems in school but because they never grew up here, and because they had totally different experiences in their youth, there was no meeting of the mind.  They had no real answers beyond that which parents tend to give their kids.  Those words didn’t help me in finding salvation although since I never spoke about it, they never knew.  Like Mr. X, I’m a fantastic actress too.  I have wondered, and have been tempted to ask him, whether his parents failed to lend him that ear, that understanding, the advice that would see him through those harsh years.  I don’t know, again a question that seems too personal to just throw out there. 

Anyhow, Mr. X, (again hopefully you know who you are) I appreciate your struggle.  Don’t give up, Buddy.  There is a light at the end of every emotional insecurity tunnel.  I have faith that one day you’ll get to the end of yours and realize that indeed you are way better than the boy you were, pretty terrific as the man you are now and more importantly, your future self will only be more enhanced with the years.  For the present though, at least recognize how far you have come and possibly stop looking back.  May be it’s time to invest in your own sword so you can slay your own dragons, those pesky things.  And in the meantime, know you got a few of us out here willing to slay right along with you.