When You Try Too Hard to Fit In, You Forget What’s Right
Don’t let yourself be a puppet unless you’re the puppeteer.
Getting expelled from high school isn’t your typical coming-of-age story.
Halfway through 9th grade, my friends and I got in some serious doo-doo for stealing from other students. Not just lunch money. I’m talking wallets and iPods and even a laptop.
Looking back, I’m pretty fucking lucky that I didn’t end up as some dude’s girlfriend in a juvenile detention center.
But getting kicked out of school taught me that fitting into a group isn’t such a great thing to aim for. Because when you try too hard to fit in, you wind up forgetting who you are.
Once you start, it’s hard to stop
The pressure not to be a social outcast in high school made my freshman year somewhat anxiety-provoking. Coming out of middle school as a mildly popular 8th grader, I felt like I was starting all over, but with much more to prove. There were girls in our classes now, which made social proof all the more crucial. And puberty.
I wasn’t alone in my anxiety, and that’s probably what drew me to my three closest friends.
I’d felt like the only way to overcome the fear of acceptance in high school was to identify myself with a specific group of friends. Everyone else had their cliques, so why shouldn’t I?
I didn’t trust myself enough to be able to march to the beat of my own drum and not look like a fool. But I figured I could learn to march to whatever beat my friends were drumming. At least we’d be fools together.
And that’s when things went south.
Because when the friends you cling to start doing questionable things, your first reaction isn’t to think that it’s wrong. You don’t think twice when you find your friend yanking on the door of someone else’s gym locker. Hell, you give him a hand. It’s no big deal; some guy left some change in his locker and we just wanna grab some snacks from the store.
But then pocket change for snacks turns into billfolds, and billfolds turn into iPods. iPods turn into somebody’s bag with a laptop in it.
You hear an announcement during assembly about somebody’s laptop being stolen and you turn to your friend with a mixture of shock and thrill. For a second, you have a flashback of what morals look like. But that quickly passes.
You get surprisingly comfortable with going through bags that don’t belong to you and spending money that isn’t yours. At one point, you delude yourself into thinking your parents and the school know what you’re up to but don’t really mind. Hey, you’re fitting in.
And then one day, the assistant dean shows up in the middle of your English class and points at you, and you never knew your heart could sink so fast.
You feel your legs shrink while you walk to your impending execution. Like an idiot, you ask the assistant dean what this is about. You shrink even more when he doesn’t answer you.
Sit down with the dean who’s nice enough to smile while the assistant dean plays bad cop. Scream inside your head as your reality implodes. Learn that you’ve been caught doing the things you knew all along you shouldn’t have been doing.
And then it hits you. Your fear of being a loser didn’t end up making you just any old loser. No, you’re the worst kind — the loser who doesn’t even know he is one.
Get picked up by your Dad after school. Worry that you’ll give him a heart attack while he’s driving. Keep to yourself. Lie and say nothing’s wrong when he notices you seem off.
Stumble into the house. Ask your Mom to come up to your room. Tell her you want to say something in private.
“I got in trouble for stealing at school today.”
Watch her eyes blank. Cringe as she stares at you like you just murdered her firstborn.
Discover then and there that deceiving yourself to fit in is incalculably worse than stealing your classmate’s iPod. Fade away as you realize you don’t have a clue who you really are or what the world is.
Lesson #1: It only takes a couple of steps before you unconsciously fall down the rabbit hole of fitting in. The more you crave the feeling of acceptance, the more willing you are to deform your idea of what’s acceptable.
Letting yourself be a puppet
It’d be easy to say that I just got caught up with the wrong group of kids, but that’s absolute bullshit.
All the other guys in the group have gone on to lead very successful lives. One’s a doctor from one of the top medical schools in the world, and another’s a sergeant in the US Air Force and a loving father.
To say that I was a victim of peer pressure puts me on the same level as Kermit the Frog when he doesn’t have a hand up his ass.
And I guess that’s what I was. An unconscious, unthinking puppet whose strings were so attached to a desire to fit in that they bypassed all sense of morality.
I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that my urge to fit in got the best of me. I let it get the best of me because I refused to do the difficult thing and actually think for myself. I exchanged my free will for a sense of belonging. Plus, if all my friends were doing it, then it must be the right thing to do. Right?
Lesson #2: Don’t let yourself be a puppet unless you’re the puppeteer. Figure out whose life you’re really living. Whose choices are you making, and who’s actually making those choices?
‘Cool’ is a lousy shortcut to confidence
I won’t lie; it’s tough not to buy into the popular ideas of what you should do and what you’re missing out on.
After getting kicked out of that high school, I realized that chasing after what I thought was ‘cool’ was really a way for me to feel better about my lack of confidence.
I knew deep down I couldn’t overcome my fears of social rejection on my own, so I hid behind what I thought was ‘cool.’ I did things I know I shouldn’t have done because it felt a lot better to be accepted by others than it did to have to actually try to make something of myself.
Fitting into a group and stealing gave to me what startups give to the corporations that buy them: speed-to-market. It was a quick and cheap way to develop a fake sense of confidence, built with Chinese drywall on a sinkhole.
Lesson #3: True confidence comes from within. No amount of ‘cool’ and outside approval can fill in for your own belief in yourself.
Nobody really fits in
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.
— Aldous Huxley
A lot of what people proclaim these days makes it seem like the group takes priority over the individual. Everyone wants you to work as a team. People feel sorry for you if you’re single. You’re told to apologize for the color of your skin because of the unfair privilege it affords you.
Fuck. That. Noise.
We experience the world as individuals, not as a collective. Each of us has our own way of seeing and acting in the world. Everyone has their own unique ambitions.
Getting kicked out of high school didn’t just teach me to stop trying to fit in. It taught me that nobody ever really fits in because fitting in goes against what it means to be an individual.
People don’t actually fit in. We just give up on trying to be individuals. We let ourselves become puppets so we can receive prostate exams at the hands of external approval. We let other people run our lives because it’s a lot easier than figuring out what’s right or wrong on our own.
We focus too much on group similarities. We forget that individual differences do matter, and maybe more so than what makes us look alike.
Ultimately, there is no group without the individual. The distinctiveness of the group depends on the distinctiveness of the individual. You don’t get to be distinct by fitting in.
Lesson #4: The individual is bigger than the group. The moment you sacrifice your personal integrity, you sacrifice the integrity of the group.
When I learned that I was getting kicked out of school, I realized it didn’t matter anymore whether or not I tried my best to be a good boy and fit in. Fitting in was just a poor way of insulating myself against the terrors and hardships of the world. It taught me that it doesn’t matter how attached I am to a group. In the end, I had to take responsibility for my actions as an individual, so I might as well try thinking like an individual from the start.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live your life the way you want as long as it’s right for you; if it’s something that aligns with you from the depths of your soul. Better to distance yourself from what you feel is wrong than to mindlessly believe in what everyone else claims to be right.
The pressure to fit in is real. It tells you to be polite and say ‘thank you’ and that you should stuff yourself into a box with other people. But it also prods you toward things you might not otherwise volunteer to say and do. It deceives you into thinking we experience the world as a whole, even though we’re constantly by ourselves within our minds.
Don’t let people tell you how you should fit in. Figure out what the beat of your own drum sounds like and learn to march to it. Let others try to fit in with you.
