The Funny Thing About Cool
While surrounded by a group of radiation therapists today, talking about my choice of hair color and the mixed-media art book I was reading, I realized something with a jolt. I've finally reached the age in life where all the things that made me an outcast as a child make me surprisingly cool.
Go figure!
Being cool changes as you get older, that's for sure. As a child or young adult, general consensus seems to be that cool involves excelling at whatever it is that makes people fit in. The more brightly you conform, the more popular others rank you.
Are you among the first to wear what everyone else will be wearing this semester? Cool. Did you get a place on the team that everyone is dying to be a part of? Extra cool. Did the end of year voting confirm that more people find you adorable than anyone else? Well, don't you rule!
But be the kid who spends time away from the crowd, configuring your computer, drawing dark images, or designing a prom dress from duct tape, and you may find that you aren't cool at all. You're suspicious. Creepy. Weird.
No one mentions that you are also probably a genius with a great future in store.
I was the scrawny, pale girl with the big dark sunglasses, back in the days when kids just did not wear sunglasses. Hiding out from the next migraine, I was designing magazines and catalogs on the backsides of my dad's airline mechanic diagrams or editing the BASIC code in computer games to make them do what I wanted them to do. I didn't try to be weird; I just followed my instincts.
I was just as sensitive as anyone else, though (or more so), and I knew that I was an outcast. Other kids rarely understood me. They either avoided me because I wasn't cool or seemed confused by me because my interests were so different from theirs. When people tell me that their high school years were the best years of their life, I think, "Wow, we certainly lived on different planets!" For me, it was a hard time when I had to learn more self-sufficiency than might have been normal.
However, despite how difficult it was, I want any teenagers who stumble on this entry to know that I wouldn't trade my outcast path for any other. It made me a great observer. It made me brave in odd ways. And it gave me a life that is endlessly interesting-even if it is sometimes just interesting to me.
Understand that there are still plenty of people (I'm related to some of them!) who smile indulgently at my latest creations and say, "well, somebody has too much time on her hands." But plenty more get excited about what I've liberated from my imagination. In the best moments, they even share their ideas with me and we share joyful moments. We tell secrets of our outcast hearts. We think up things we've never seen before. And that, my friend, is very, very cool.
I'm reminded of what Tim Burton said back in 2003, when asked what he expected of his newborn son:
''I just hope he's not popular,'' he said. ''At my 10-year high-school reunion, all the popular people, the good students, turned out to be unappealing. The so-called misfits all turned out to be attractive. So if you have a child, you should almost hope they're not popular in high school. You were beaten up today? Well, that's not such a bad idea. You don't like talking to anybody? You like sitting in your room alone? Well, we have nothing but hope for you.''
Similar yarns
Technorati Tags: Big Thoughts- ‹ previous
- 201 of 409
- next ›
Post new comment