Embrace Your Weirdness

Let’s face it, high school is challenging. Not so much the lessons, which tend to be pretty simple. The most difficult aspect of high school is negotiating the norms and expectations of an opinionated adolescent microsociety, and doing everything possible, including tremendous leaps of energy and inventiveness, to avoid doing or doing anything that would earn the unshakeable label of being odd. Being labeled as unusual in high school is a death sentence. So most people try to appear like everyone else. However, in the end, we are all hiding. We’re still figuring out who we are and where we fit on the social interaction spectrum. Mistakes are unavoidable, but they should be committed in secret, away from the limelight of the halls, lunchroom, or special events. High school students are permitted to be nervous wrecks, fearful that their own shadow would mock them if they slip and fall. However, it should have stopped there. Shouldn’t the crushing desire for peer acceptance go away after we graduate from high school and become well-adjusted adults? The high school years are long gone, yet the social pressure to adhere to others’ expectations remains as powerful as it has ever been. Everyone, young and old, it seemed, is still terrified of seeming odd.