If middle school was the jumping-off point for your interpersonal interactions via web as it was mine, we probably share similar social experiences. You made a Twitter at the ripe age of thirteen, when you were so obviously mature and responsible enough to broadcast your thoughts without causing life-long damage. Your prepubescent, overwhelmingly-desperate-to-fit-in teeny bop self scrolled through a feed littered with subtweets that all had potential to be about you and retweets that pictured whatever trend happened to be #goals at the time. Every mundane, 85 percent of the time embarrassing (in retrospect, thanks Time Hop), tweet you carefully typed out to fit the 140 character limit in perfect wording all served a single purpose. They were meant to brand you as all of the things you needed to be to climb the social hierarchy ladder – cool as ice, indifferent to things that actually moved you and passionate about whatever everyone else seemed passionate about.
Tweeting for others is perfectly okay if fitting in wherever you are is among the most important things to you. It definitely was for me throughout most of my middle and high school days. The gap between sixth and seventh grade, my transition from elementary to middle school and one of the most crucial building blocks in social constructs, left me dangling somewhere in the range of kind of cool, but not really, emphasis on the latter part of that statement. I earned my “somewhat cool” status primarily because my main group of friends was cool. My friends were pretty cool, I wouldn’t be friends with them if I didn’t think they were. The thing is, I don’t really have high standards for what I deem “cool”. Many things are interesting to me, both quirky and living embodiments of perfection alike. I was the girl in high school that drifted between the “popular” group and pretty much anyone else that I thought was interesting regardless of whether they were considered strange. It doesn’t sound like anything spectacular, but when you come from a small, oppressive high school, not many people tend to drift between groups. Everyone knows their place, and they stay in it. Derby High is the quintessential, yet much less glamorous version of the cafeteria scene in “Mean Girls”--- I’m guessing many other high schools are as well. However, the real life “mean girls” typically aren’t labeled by their cruel actions, but by a blunt, utter indifference toward those around them who weren’t fortunate enough to make the cut.
It’s hard to decipher what is worse – facing relentless bullying, being invisible, or taking the role of the underdog that seldom triumphs in the monopoly that is high school social status. All of the above suck, pure and simple. Nobody wants to assume any of the aforementioned roles, so they sacrifice bits and pieces of themselves to fit the mold for what is socially acceptable. But doing so is stifling and tiring. You just want to be able to jam to old Frank Sinatra songs, read your sci-fi, and gush over professional figure skating, but nobody seems to care about any of that except you. The truth is, there probably is someone who likes what you like. You might just be missing out on their companionship because they’re a weirdo, and associating with them may force you to acknowledge that there’s a little bit of weirdo in you too. And the even more pressing truth is that everyone has a little weirdo in them, it's just packaged differently.
I feel like I’m starting to sound like some guest-starring friendship week creature on “Sesame Street” that has a segment on sharing and being kind. I think I might have a promising career as that creature.
In all seriousness though, your pursuit of popularity in high school isn’t worth it. That is only four years of your life, and nobody genuinely likes you if you act like a butt hole towards other perfectly fine people. You want to be able to look back at yourself and say that you were the type of person that talked to Janis Ian regardless of the fact that Regina George said she was a dyke (which is obviously just the most awful, no good thing a human can be. Forget rapist, forget axe murderer, dyke will surely land you a one way ticket to hell). It’s much better to be that chill person that gave everyone a chance, rather than that bitch.
