Today’s guest post is by Steve Grooms.
It is bizarre to remember the shame I used to feel about being an oddball. In my youth I thought of myself as an alien plunked down among normal people. My life was an elaborate ruse, me trying to imitate the look and behavior of normal people, trying to sneak by without being discovered.
You might wonder what quality in me convinced me that I was so weird. My deep secret was shhhh! that I was a “daydreamer!”
The word referred to a person who had something like a non-stop flow of stories in his head. Other kids would be sitting beside me in school, frowning with concentration as they confronted the multiplication table, while just a few feet away I was playing a sort of movie in my head in which I was fighting Communists. I couldn’t guess what was going on in the heads of other kids, but I was sure they weren’t thinking strange and inappropriate thoughts like I was.
When I recall them, the stories I used to find so compelling now seem embarrassingly conventional. In a typical story I might dive in front of a hurtling automobile to push some cute girl to safety. She would live but I would die, my head crunched on the grill of a Studebaker. My dying would let everyone in town contemplate how badly they had misunderestimated me. In my script there would be an older cop with a deeply wrinkled face who would observe: “Susie owes her life to Steve’s courage.” (Then—for the life of me I don’t know why—the cop would add, “The poor lad obviously didn’t know how this day would turn out, or he would have worn fresh underwear.”)
I might as well mention my favorite daydream in my teen years. It had me and Annette Funicello up in a tiny pontoon plane deep in the wilderness of Alaska. Uh oh! The engine would crap out, causing us to crash land on some unnamed lake. Annette and I would be unscarred, but all the adults died (ha! that eliminates all those pesky would-be chaperones!). In my fantasy I would have plenty of time to find out if Annette might be a bit frisky if I could talk her out of her mouse ears. And if not, I’d still enjoy the best fishing of my life until we were rescued. This was a fantasy with a built-in backup plan.
Because I was a daydreamer, I saw myself as an outsider. I wasn’t part of the school social culture like one of the popular kids who was a musician or debater or even one of the unsocialized dweebs in flannel shirts who ran the school projectors. I wasn’t a musclebound football player who strutted school corridors with a cheerleader draped on each arm. I was just me, a shy goofball with too much imagination. My image of myself was that of a lonely kid standing in some outer ring, staring wistfully in at kids in the middle of things, all those kids who enjoyed a degree of popularity I could only experience in fantasy.
Memories of this have come back to me recently, along with the stunning perception that many or most of the kids I admired in school also saw themselves as outsiders. Some of those kids were outsiders (in their own eyes) because they lived on farms and took a bus to school. Some were outsiders because they were tall or short. Some came from families struggling to maintain a lower middle class life standard. The Greek and Italian kids fought a subtle racism that most of the town would have denied existed. Some kids were just too damn bright for their own good. Our town was so lily white that Jewish families had to drive 30 miles to Des Moines to attend synagogue, and I know the kids felt like outsiders because of that.
I’ve been reflecting on the consequences of seeing one’s self as an outsider. The girl who was too Greek to be American and too American to be Greek became, in time, a sophisticated observer of both societies. The boy whose intelligence got him tagged as “an egghead” learned to appreciate the irony of the way intellectually limited kids so often taunted smart kids. Most outsiders stopped feeling freakish when they found people like themselves in college and they then could stop judging themselves by the narrow standards of high school.
Now I am amused to note that almost every close friend is a former “outsider” whose sense of life was enriched by loneliness and longing. I harbor no resentments toward kids who had it all their way in high school. They had the confidence and discipline to do difficult things when they were young. I don’t hold it against them that they got their act together a decade or so earlier than I did.
It is probably a good thing that so many youngsters see themselves as outsiders, for their ranks give us our writers, social critics and standup comedians. And it is surely a good thing some kids were insiders, too. They acquired leadership experience early in life, experience that is often difficult for a former outsider to learn. Maybe a healthy, integrated, fully functioning society requires the creative efforts of the naturally confident as well as those who felt condemned to a marginal life on the fringe.
Were you an innie or an outie or maybe something else? What has that meant in your life?
Trail Baboon 