The Anatomy of a Loser

 

One's school life many times is like a bag of Chex mix, overall it's pretty good, but there is always that weird flavored pretzel that the food god's seem to deal you no matter how hard you try to avoid it.  I guess if one were to back up and look at the big picture, the troubles of one's school life are just one part of a much larger maze that we all so comfortably call growing up.  It feels a little strange reducing one's childhood, and life for that matter, to that of a rat working his or her way through a seemingly pointless lab experiment, but essentially that's what it all boils down to; we are presented with a series of decisions; if we push button number one, we get a sweet treat, and if we choose button two, we get a shock.  The problem with this little experiment is that everything in the maze seems to lure us to button two, but the shock is delayed, and it's only with age and some maturing that we realize how wrong our choices really were.

I think it was along about the 7th grade when I realized that everyone in my class couldn't stay friends with each other forever.  The lines of demarcation were visibly growing, slow at first, but then they quickly picked up speed and strength until by the end of the year my school looked more like an episode of Survivor than a healthy learning environment.  Anyone who has been through school can relate to what I am talking about.  It doesn’t matter if you attended school in the 50’s or in the 2000’s, the voting criteria in this sadistic game hasn't changed, doesn't change, and will never change, so you will be all too familiar with the common weak links.  Stinky kid was always the first to go, velcro-pleather shoe guy was a close second, followed by poor kid, religious kid, and finally weird kid who wore all black finished out the top six.  As harsh as these labels might sound, that's the way it is on the social island.  

 

Unlike Survivor, you couldn't earn immunity by winning interestingly designed challenges where you exposed your chiseled chest and ripped abs; it was simply who you were in the eyes of your peers that decided your fate.  You were exposed alright, but it was your weakness that got judged, not your strengths, and the hardest part for the social outcast was that if you were voted off you didn't get to gracefully bow out of the game and return to your normal life.  You had to stay on the island and wonder the badlands of the social world for the entire year, and more than likely, the rest of your school life.  Instead of eating with friends, you were relegated to the lunch table in the corner, you paced aimlessly along the outer reaches of the playground back by the fence mumbling to yourself like Rain Man, and you could forget birthday parties and there was no way your Valentine's shoebox would have anything thing it at the end of the day.  You were left to stand in the filth of who you were.  You were not a human with needs, wants and desires of your own, but an everlasting reminder to all those still on the island of who not to be and what not to do.

I would love to tell you that I was one of those outcasts, a pariah of sorts, wondering through my school years estranged from regular society, but I can’t.  I was one of the weak minded posers who cast my vote by placing my foot on the throats of those that were different, those who where dealt a hand full of jokers, and it pains me to think that what I thought was strength was nothing more than a manifestation of my own insecurity and weakness.  I was the one who was the real loser, the fake, the weak.  

It's amazing how strong the need to fit in and be accepted presses upon the psyche of a young person.  It's like a raging river, a torrent that slams against you; it rolls you over and over against rocks and snags; it leaves you spinning out of control grasping at anything that will keep you afloat.  Everything you are is focused on just trying to survive, and in the heat of the moment panic overwhelms your ability to see what is truly important, and as is the norm with panic, bad decisions make up the lion’s share.  It's only after you've been spit out on the sandy beaches of maturity that you realize that what you went through was a Survivor-like challenge, and yes, there was a prize; it is the revelation that you won when it came to being a selfish egotistical jerk and failed miserably when it came to being true, honest, and seeing the world from another’s perspective.  The reality is that even though today I know what lurks just beyond those shores, I am continually lured back into the current.