I’ve always preferred the “weird” people—the ones who never had a spot in the cafeteria where “their kind” congregated, the ones who never found their names on keychains in gift shops, the ones who couldn’t, even if they wanted to, typify their age, gender, race, culture, or religion. As a teacher of thousands of high school students over the years, I’ve been delighted by the steady flow of students, year after year, who aren’t trying to prove anything or to be intentionally nonconformist. They just see the world from a perspective not widely shared by their contemporaries. Heck, a perspective not shared by many at all!
These students have varying experiences in high school. Some kids are a palatable kind of weird who are adopted by one mainstream group or the other after it’s determined that the in-crowd’s social standing won’t take too much of a hit from the association. Each generation has its cinematic adolescent anthem of the token oddball finding acceptance; Can’t Buy Me Love and Stranger Things come to mind. Sure, it’s rough going initially while the “cool” kids harass, haze, and generally make like difficult for the pariah, but eventually the outsider does something to redeem themselves and are finally welcomed into the fold of acceptance.
The other kind of weird can be heartbreaking to observe in daily life at school (and in society once they age out of the education system). Students in the latter camp are derisively labeled “off brand” when their clothing or “vibe” are too fringe even for their peers who pride themselves on their inclusivity and #westandtogether image. The untouchables in this latter group aren’t shopping Goodwill or sometimes forgoing regular hygiene as some demonstration of irony. They aren’t professing gender ambiguity or social awkwardness because those are what social media have alerted the presses as being the latest bandwagon to leap onto. These kids are doing the best they can, navigating the most treacherous time of their lives with too little life experience and too much (self) criticism oftentimes to make it through unscathed.
I love these people who have been rejected by the mainstream; I feel a kinship to them because in my own life I’ve felt as though I’m walking a continual and precarious line of being “too much” or “too little” of a whole host of things. I admire the kids who recognize how very much they don’t check off the “right” boxes and they don’t particularly care, and I empathize with the ones who are forced by circumstances—not having the right clothes, right homes, right feelings, right experiences— over which they have no power to feel like aliens in spaces where they shouldn’t have to prove their worth.
Without one trace of self pity, my dad would sometimes reveal glimpses into his childhood to my sister and me as we were growing up. When she or I would criticize the lunch served in the school cafeteria or complain that “everybody” at school now had a particular brand and style of shoe except us, my dad would look at us thoughtfully and recall that when he was in elementary school there was no money in his family for hot lunch in the cafeteria and no subsidized meal plans from which he and his siblings could benefit. The school, not wanting to be heartless, sent my dad to the playground so he did not have to sit in the lunchroom with his classmates and watch them eat. They would send him with a carton of milk. He said that sometimes the milk would be frozen and to thaw it enough to drink, he would hold it between his legs while he sat on a swing. When he was seven he convinced the local dry cleaner to allow him to break down cardboard boxes in exchange for having his clothes, second-hand and perpetually ill-fitting, laundered so that his peers wouldn’t make fun of their smell. His parents, both alcoholics, would allow the family dog to sleep on the pile of clothes his mother would bring in from the laundromat and leave heaped in a corner.
No doubt hearing these stories from my father my entire life created the lens through which I see everyone, myself included. I see in my students and my peers the power of an open heart, curious mind, and questioning spirit. People who can look past what seems obvious in order to learn more, to engage with their world and those who share it with them, are the ones who make the difference. The ones who can face hurdles, ridicule, and misunderstanding while retaining hope and heart are extraordinary. When I get the privilege of reconnecting with former students and see that life has not diminished their incandescence and eccentricity, it gives me hope that there are others who recognize that to be considered peculiar by a society that is capable of intellectual myopia and chronic disapproval is a gift to be protected and shared.
PartWolf 