You’ve seen them before—it’s the homeless man that begs for money in the town square, the awkward boy longing for a girl to notice him, the woman who talks too much, the geeks, the freaks, the dumb ones, the loose ones, the abandoned ones. It’s those who aren’t pretty enough, aren’t exceptional enough to be noticed at school, aren’t aggressive enough to be heard at work. It’s the unpopular people—those who just don’t seem to fit in anywhere. You know who they are; they’re the outcasts.

The other day I wasn’t feeling well and decided to binge watch Netflix. I was looking for something that I hadn’t seen before, and I found a movie under the comedy section, which is one of my favorite genres, and chose a movie entitled TheOutcasts. The movie started out with a rather geeky-looking girl, played by Eden Sher, whom I recognized from the television show The Middle. She was describing the stereotypical social cliques that you would find at any high school. Appearing like a knock off of Mean Girls, except with cheesier acting, I was about to return to the home menu to look for something better to watch. But then it got interesting. Instead of the geeky girl, Mindy, trying to become more popular by becoming one of the popular groups, she decides to make the outcasts unite, thus making them more popular. After all, the outcasts outnumber the popular group by far.

The outcasts outnumber the popular. Think about that. If the outcasts outnumber the so-called popular people, aren’t the popular people really the ones who are the outcasts?

In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a social hierarchy. We would all be friends and treat each other with love and respect. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where those who are powerful, aggressive and wealthy are on top. They are the ones that “rule.” Those who are socially awkward, timid, financially unstable and flawed in appearance are looked at as, well, unpopular. Yet, why would you want to be plastic? Fake? Exactly like everyone else? In Mean Girls, Cady discovers that becoming plastic means that she’d lost her own identity and had become exactly like The Plastics. Similarly, in The Outcasts, Mindy discovers that in her efforts to make all the outcasts popular, she became just as nasty as the popular group.

So why not be an outcast? Why not embrace it? Being an outcast doesn’t have to be a social catastrophe. Don’t be afraid to be unique. Be yourself. There’s no one quite like you!