Musings

I’ve always found the tendency to categorize people to be somewhat silly. Useful, perhaps, and not always inaccurate, but still silly. An example may be in order.

When I was a junior we did a little activity in my English class that the teacher had done ever year with juniors for about ten years, maybe more. She had us list all the different “groups” of people in the school, and then place ourselves in a group. We came up with the Jocks and the Potheads and the Drama People and the Band Geeks and the Artistics and the Nerds, and so on and so forth. But we also came up with a category I don’t think had made it on the list before, and that certainly doesn’t make it on most lists you’re likely to find. We eventually settled on calling them the Normals. They were the people who didn’t really fit in to any one group, but who also weren’t social rejects because of it. They were just… people, who couldn’t be pigeonholed, not because they were super unique and shouted out their unique identities to the whole world in upper case letters (these people had their own group), but because they didn’t have one defining trait and could easily move between groups without taking on the characteristics of any group. They were the masses, the average joes who just went about their existence without worrying about defining themselves too rigorously.

We were all satisfied with this category, and proud of ourselves with having come up with it, instead of just regurgitating accepted social labels. We also came up with a category called Other, which consisted of the people who truly defied description in one word, people who were larger than life and who we all secretly admired even if we thought they were a little weird.

Then came time to place ourselves in a group, and then talk about whether we thought people’s choice was correct. Most people placed themselves without difficulty or argument from the others, and indeed, most of the people in my class placed themselves in this Normal category. When it came to my turn, that was what I did too. But there was a cry of protest, mostly from a group of girls I barely knew, or, let’s be realistic, I used to know very well when we were in Girl Scouts together, and had drifted so far apart from that it was unreal. I thought of them as Popular (even though they placed themselves as Normals and I didn’t object) and kind of above me. They told me I was not a boring Normal, that I was in fact an amazing Other, that I had a unique fashion sense (which they admitted to liking quite a bit) that didn’t take its cues from anything and that I was one hundred percent ME and I didn’t bend under pressure to become what other people thought I should be.

I was very flattered, but I was also very confused. Normal was pretty much how I defined myself. I mean, there was that level of myself that thought of me as a unique and special and mysterious and wonderful. Everyone does. But I also knew it wasn’t true. I don’t know where I was on the continuum of self-esteem at the time, but I did know that I wasn’t really that unique. I thought of myself as a jeans-and-a-t-shirt girl, and not just in the fashion sense. But as I was about to deny it, I looked down at myself and realized that I was wearing an outfit entirely cobbled together from my finds at Goodwill the night before. Big brown boots with steel toes, a blue button up shirt, and green plastic pants. It didn’t really work, and I sort of even knew that. But it definitely destroyed my argument of normalcy, especially considering that I did this Goodwill outfit thing on a fairly regular basis. I stopped arguing and just smiled, and we put my name in the Other category, to my pride and embarrassment.

But it left me thinking. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. About labels, and other people’s perceptions of me, and their perceptions of my perceptions of them. And I’m still thinking. But one conclusion I’ve come to is that we all think we’re special, but deep down we know we’re not. And, really, they’re both right. As for high school labels, the fact is that we put those labels on ourselves, and then forget we’ve done so and try to live up to our own reputations and what we think other people’s expectations are. And while you’re going through high school, trying to figure out who you are, that’s probably okay. You need to try on different identities in order to make your own. But buying too much into those labels, as though people really are just different flavors of Skittles, is far too simple. Am I Normal? Am I Other? Am I a Band Geek? A wife, a writer, a blogger, a girl, a twenty-something, a Firefly fan?

Yes. And no. I am all of those things, but most of all I am me. A label of one.