Now Playing: No Light, No Light (Ryan Gosling Remix) by Florence + The Machine (you want a revelation, you want to get it right, but that's a conversation I just can't have tonight)
The best part of my day is going home.
It's the only time that is liberated from the suffocating social dynamics and petty playground politics of school. I walk to the train station with one or two really good friends, and we just muck around. I normally get off at the train station everyone else gets off at and we buy Cokes and ice creams and just chill for a little while before we all go our own separate ways in a brief interlude of solitude before we are all reunited by the mystical powers of facebook. It's wonderful. I don't have to watch what I say, I don't get snide looks and little smirks of condescension just for being myself. I can hug people, talk to people, without other people glaring at me for not knowing my place. Egalitarianism.
It's the only time of the day where I really enjoy being around people - and a part of it is because the social overload is balanced by bus time. I don't have to worry about bitchiness or gossip or being stabbed in the back. I don't have to worry about group dynamics.
Group dynamics. Fascinating stuff - I'm studying next year in uni. But in reality, it sucks. Big time.
I've never been very good at groups. I don't like working in groups and I've never really had a big friendship group. My friends are individuals, and I love them as individuals - and in a group there will invariably be at least someone, normally someone pretty high up in the hierarchy, where that doesn't work out so well. I am enormously forgiving with my friends, and in turn they are enormously forgiving to me. My friendships are with very forgiving people. But there aren't enough people who forgive me for being human to have a whole group of them.
The force of conformity and the fear of ostracization is more profound than a gun to the head. It impacts us all, even those who have told me rather grandly to 'fuck the general consensus' and that they don't care what other people think. When we're alone and thinking rationally, we'll realize that membership of a social group or a place on the social hierarchy is not worth the personal sacrifice, but it's like being in love - once we're with people we don't think straight. We like to think of ourselves as the non-conformist, the unbeliever - the media has always told us to sympathize with the outcast, the unlikely hero, the subaltern. But we don't. When push comes to shove, once we gain acceptance we will go to any lengths to protect it, degrade ourselves to the most humiliating things, hurt the ones we love the most, just to avoid obscurity. Even me in all my gung-ho rebelliousness is impacted by this. The only reason why I'm not at this very moment is because I tried, I tried so very very hard to fit in. I'm not afraid to say that if I could make it work I would go with the flow. But it didn't work. It's not that I've rejected acceptance - I have nothing to accept or reject. Being the subaltern...it's liberating in a sense. I don't have to fight to be a non-conformist. Lack of conformity just comes very very naturally.
People are constantly telling me that I'm too blunt and too stubborn - I don't let enough slide. Do you know how much I let slide, each and every day? Even my closest friends hurt me pretty regularly, but I never complain. How much more can you let slide before you stop being a human and start becoming a doormat?
It surprises people that I am actually friends with one or two 'popular' people - people in different circles, circles that don't really consider me to be a human being on par with them in all their perfection. It's because I love people as people, as they are, quirks and all, and I don't judge - I don't judge them for their friends, even if I hate them and they detest me, or completely refuse to acknowledge that I too am a human being. Being friends with someone in a particular group is in no way a free ticket into the club - and I have never tried to be 'one of them', as it were.
The hardest part about having friends in high places is the total lack of equality. It's year twelve. I'm done with social climbing. It never did me any good anyway. But it would be nice, you know, to approach my friends who are in different social groups without their friends blocking me out, pushing me away, turning a blind eye to what is so obviously more than just a cordial acquaintance. I'm done with girls bitching to my face and behind my back. It is the hardest part of my day - harder than any work any teacher could ever give me - to be treated with such condescension, and having to accept it, and smile, and be the better man when the last thing you feel like doing is being civil. I don't need to be best friends with everybody. But unless you've really rubbed me the wrong way - by being a dick, not by being 'weird' - I am unfailingly polite to everybody, and not polite in that snotty, pretentious way that is so well bred into some people. Say what you like about me, you can't doubt my sincerity.
I have never seen being different as a bad thing. I hate the monotony of high school - nobody seems to have any personality. If I went out with one of the boys in my grade it would be much the same as dating any other boy in the grade - nobody ever does anything to make them special, to make them unique, to make them different. Being different...people keep telling me that it's good, that it's attractive to be different, and yet all these years of bullying, of being ignored, isolated, ostracized, dismissed, totally unacknowledged...it wears you down to breaking point. Nobody's thrown a punch at me in a long time, but the slow psychological mind fuck that is the group dynamics of high school is really getting to me. Relationships of any kind - including friendships - are hard enough as they are. There are fights and glitches you have to work over, and sometimes they cave in on themselves even when conditions are perfect. But it's a thousand times harder with such a hostile social climate.
And yet, I say nothing. I complain to my friends, the friends who treat me as an equal, and not the friends who are sheltered in the cocoon of friends I never had and never will have. I cry by myself. The power of the subaltern is that sometimes, it is the subaltern that has to protect the hegemon, not the other way around. No matter how hurt I am by some people, I'm always happy to know that they make my friends happy - at least they're nice to somebody, just not me. I'll never change for a friend, but I will put up with an extraordinary amount of crap on their behalf. I don't want to cause trouble, especially not now when none of us really need the extra drama. This is something I'll bear alone, and I won't try and pry someone away from people who are so very nice to them, even if they're horrible to me. I'm the subaltern. I've had a lifetime of ostracism, a lifetime of not being good enough for some people. I think I can handle this. In a few weeks we'll be away from the claustrophobia of high school, and we'll all wonder why it was so dreadfully important for so-and-so to be nice to us, or what was so imperative about staying in someone or other's good books. Time is nothing. This too will pass. The people to whom I meant nothing to will mean nothing to me, and simply melt into nonexistence. True friendships, I hope, will be a little more endurant.
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