Table of Contents
Socially appropriate timing
For instance, my single, never-married friend in her forties showed up at a party and within five minutes was asked, “Where’s your husband?” And five minutes after that, was asked by that person’s wife, “So are you in a big rush to have kids, given your age?” Likely it’s intended as friendly curiosity, but from my own similar experiences I know it’s difficult to ignore the implied judgment of what you “should be” versus what you seem to be, by people who haven’t taken time to get to know you. These people clearly thought that a person should be married and heterosexual and have children by the time they’re in their forties. Additionally, they seemed to need reassurance that yes, my friend had a husband, and yes, though she was older than she “should” be, she was eager—in a rush!—to have children. They needed for my friend to fit into their “box” of age- and gender-appropriate behavior.
Someone I dated years ago, let’s call them Alex, responded to my frustration over never seeming to fall in sync with what people opined I “should” be doing with, “Charlie, sometimes
you just have to contort.” I only sighed, though I was tempted to say, “Easy for you, because you don’t need to contort.” Alex was one of those people who followed all the rules of “timing,” because those rules were made with people like Alex in mind. Alex also liked to say, “Life is a resume”—a confining notion, though one I believe many of us subscribe to, if unwittingly.
Expectations for what’s age-appropriate aren’t always the same for everyone in a particular culture. Broadly, we have notions of how people should behave or be living in their fifties that differ from our notions, say, of how people in their thirties should behave or be living. But these notions differ depending on whether the people in question are women or men, white or people of color, or affluent or economically disadvantaged.
Regardless of who we are, where we come from, or what means we have, we live our lives boxed in by this kind of timing, these societal expectations for what we should be doing at all ages in a human lifespan. Anyone inclined to say, “I’m not boxed in,” likely lives in alignment with the social expectations that surround them. That, or they’re rich enough to think they can buy their way out of any box, which, I would argue, is the general societal expectation for the rich (the thinking they can buy their way out, not actually being able to do so. Even the very rich can’t buy their way out of this particular box). We in many ways really are like fishes in an aquarium, and like fishes, we, all of us, can’t help but perceive that aquarium to be the world. “Timing” is…everything.
You never can know where you’ll end up…or when
Here’s an example from my own experience of just how hardened in our minds this notion of timing can be. I was 18, a college first-year, and had just heard the most fascinating story from a woman in my Essay Writing seminar; let’s call her Brianne. She had intrigued me since our first class meeting, with her poise and her graciousness in considering classmates’ ideas. Overall she seemed more mature than the other seven of us, even though she appeared to be the same age we were—between 18 and 22, or so I assumed, given some of us were first-years, some fourth-years, and some in between.
I automatically assumed we all were what’s commonly considered “college-aged.” I’d grown up in a relatively affluent town where most people commuted to white-collar jobs in the big city. It was expected that we kids would go to college directly out of high school. Not to do so generally was viewed as a statement that you didn’t care about your future, and probably wouldn’t amount to much. This was the inherited mindset with which I began college (and this was before it became not uncommon for teens to take an experiential “gap year” between high school and college). Brianne chipped that mindset one day as we walked across campus together and she told me about herself.
By the time Brianne had started high school, she said, she and her family had accepted the fact that college was not an option for her. Her grades all through school had been terrible, and neither her parents nor her teachers understood why. Even when she tried her best, her grades still were terrible. Eventually she stopped trying, and teachers dismissed her as an unmotivated, unpromising student. She hated reading and avoided books. Writing was a hellish struggle. After high school, she took a job as a receptionist, and got by on her kind-heartedness and sense of humor. Her boss took her under her wing, and observed that Brianne actually was quite intelligent. She was the first person who suggested that perhaps Brianne should be tested for dyslexia. It turned out this had been Brianne’s problem all along.
“I realized that what everyone thought, what I thought—that the problem was that I was just dumb—wasn’t true,” Brianne said. “And that if it wasn’t true, then I could go to college. I could have a whole different future than I’d envisioned.”
She told me about the years working with tutors to overcome her dyslexia, all under the mentorship of her boss and now dear friend. She worked hard, and when she was accepted at our Ivy League university, it took her a while to believe it wasn’t a hoax, since never in all her life had she imagined it was possible. She looked at me and smiled. “So now you know why, as you say, I’m always so enthusiastic in our class. I never believed I’d be able to read an essay, let alone write one.”
“That’s such an amazing story,” I said. I hugged her, in the middle of the red-brick walkway that connected the campus buildings. Simultaneously I felt the crack in the marble edifice of my privileged social conditioning. Something hard seemed to soften. I imagined how much more gratitude one would feel to realize a distant dream of attending college, rather than merely to fulfill a social expectation of doing so.
Further complicating my view was that in my social milieu, it wasn’t enough to simply attend college, but to attend one of the “best,” that is, most prestigious, colleges. I had applied to one of the “Big Three” east-coast Ivies. When I received the tell-tale thin envelope in the mail the following April, even though I had admittances to several good schools, I felt like I had failed. I believed what my milieu told me I should believe—that not going to one of the Big Three universities meant my path only ever would be sub-par.
This was a belief I inherited. It was something I believed out of habit, whereas a part of me was forming my own belief, that there are many paths to and definitions of success, and college doesn’t even have to be part of them. Brianne’s story appealed to that part of me. Like marble, however, social conditioning doesn’t soften, or dissolve, just like that. It chips, cracks, and crumbles from a lot of force applied over a long stretch of time—and even then, like ruins of a former civilization, partial walls remain standing.
Near the end of our conversation, Brianne told me she was 26. Right there, with her glowing in the victory over adversity her poignant story revealed, and me alight with genuine admiration, a thought so provincial it embarrasses me even today snaked its way out of some stubborn marble edifice in my brain. How, I wondered, can you be 26 and still in college?
Brianne had just told me how!
Fast forward to my college graduation. My mom came, and my partner Alex. When my name was called to walk to the podium to receive my diploma from the college president, I feared no one would cheer for me. I was one of the oldest undergraduates at this tiny liberal arts college in rural New England, and though I felt the same grateful enthusiasm toward my education as Brianne had exhibited, I also felt terribly out of place.
Instead of no one cheering, I was amazed to get to ride a swollen wave of whoops and applause all the way to the podium. It seemed that maybe, I wasn’t as big a misfit as I’d felt the entire two years at this college.
Here’s the twist: On the day I received my college diploma, I was 26—the same age Brianne had been all those years ago.
“Great expectations”: the challenges and benefits of being out of sync
Since taking that Essay Writing seminar with Brianne, I’ve done almost everything “out of sync.” I took a few years away from college to work. I had several jobs at once. One was as a research coordinator where most of the research assistants were graduate students five or more years older than I was. Only the principal investigator knew I hadn’t finished college. I feared the graduate students wouldn’t take me seriously if they knew. I attended conferences in an esoteric academic area where by the looks of it, in my early twenties I was the only person under fifty. It required all my courage to enter the hotels (usually) where the conferences were held, because by appearance alone, I very much was the odd one out.
Once I finally received my college diploma, I entered graduate school. There, I had difficulties with academic writing that previously had slipped under the radar, and I had to take incompletes, leave campus, and painstakingly teach myself academic writing from scratch. It took me twice as long to get my master’s than the degree was designed to take, during which time I started a job in publishing in my esoteric academic area of interest. I had to start at the bottom of the ladder, as an editorial assistant. I was thirty; the other editorial assistants all were in their early twenties.
That was excellent practice for when I moved across the country for a relationship, trusting I quickly could find a job once I got there. Talk about bad timing: The Global Financial Crisis was about to fully rear its head, and no one was hiring, especially not in editorial. And so, in my early thirties, after having been promoted to managing acquisitions editor at my previous job, I took an unpaid internship in magazine publishing where all the other interns were under 21, with hopes that my name associated with this well-known local publication might help me secure a position locally as an editor.
When still no one seemed to be hiring, I moved—alone—to a small ski resort town, where I deepened my involvement in skiing, the new hobby I’d started the only the year before, by getting paid to teach it full time. My fellow instructors either were contemporaries who’d been skiing their whole lives, had made teaching the sport their career, and were skeptical of ambitious, green newcomers; kids straight out of college looking for a ski pass and a season of adventure in a beautiful mountain town; or people much older than I was who’d retired from traditional corporate careers and taught skiing for pleasure, not for need of money. Add to that the insular, many times nepotistic, dynamics of a small town and the fact that I was new to the skiing industry, and it was impossible not to feel like an outsider, even as through consistent daily practice I quickly advanced my teaching, movement analysis, and skiing skills, and people noticed.
There’s much more to this story, of course, but where I was out of sync in the above examples wasn’t only in ending up where people either were much younger, older, or much less or more experienced than I was. I also wasn’t doing what people are “supposed” to be doing in their twenties and thirties—building a career by calculated advancements up a corporate or other career “ladder.”
Mine was more a path of experimentation and discovery. For instance, through my work as an acquisitions editor, I gradually realized that the reason I was a good editor was because I was a good writer, and I wasn’t being true to my abilities if I wasn’t focusing on my writing at least as much as on editing. When the Global Financial Crisis drove me into the mountains and the ski industry, I decided to embrace this seeming detour as an opportunity to develop my athleticism and learn about a sport, culture, climate, and geography that previously I’d never been exposed to. I embraced the fact that I had no idea where it all might lead, and I was open to the experience completely changing me. I spent nearly ten years immersed in skiing and the ski industry.
Don’t get me wrong: I gained a lot doing things the way I did. My struggles with academic writing made me a more incisive, sympathetic, and knowledgeable instructor when I taught English Composition at community college. It also gave me confidence that if I could teach myself to write in a way that does not come naturally to me, I could teach myself to write in the way that is natural to me. My years in the ski industry made me adept at moving freely in the mountains not only on skis, but also on foot—I became an avid solo hiker and backpacker, studied orienteering, ski mountaineering, and avalanche safety, and developed a love of rural living after previously living mainly in suburb and city. Also, as a ski instructor I taught people from all over the world, ranging in age from three to their seventies. Relating to so much age and cultural diversity (if not economic diversity, at an expensive resort) was humbling, a privilege, and definitely enriched my empathic and people skills. These just skim the surface of the things I gained; there are many more.
What I didn’t gain: A resume that is decipherable by applicant tracking system (ATS) software. A career trajectory true-story that’s obvious and generic enough for a potential employer interviewing me to have patience or interest to hear. A community of peers who grow together in life milestones as well as career milestones, deepening our connection. The lack of age-similar and experience-similar peers definitely has made it harder for me to meet eligible dates, and is at least one reason why I’ve not yet married and consequently, why I don’t have any children. Being single and childless as we slide into middle age in turn makes it more difficult to get connected to a community of peers, because our peers are busy maintaining their marriages and raising their growing children.
And that’s not the only reason. Our peers increasingly begin to measure their lives by their outward appearance of undebatable “adulting”: kids, house, family vacations, kid birthday parties, school involvement, career/family balance, the number of years married…. Many people’s lives become a dance of “keeping up appearances,” which really means “keeping in sync” with societal expectations. Timing is everything. People trapped in that mindset don’t always seem to have much use for those of us who remind them of the carefree independence and investment in the self that they think we have, and that they believe they’ve lost, or outgrown.
The result is feeling like an outsider; the result is loneliness. I say this as a person who generally gets on well with a diverse array of people; I’m a “people person.” If I were an animal, however, I might be this cow in Poland that escaped its enclosure and joined a herd of wild bison. It seemed the herd accepted her—she survived a winter with them when surely she’d not have survived alone—but she often was seen set apart from the herd, or on its margins. The bison accepted her…but not quite; after all, she was foreign to them—cow, not bison.
That’s how I’ve felt living “out of sync,” especially when I lived in the mountains. I was liked, generally, I believe, but not quite accepted. Not rejected, either; I just didn’t quite belong. Geographically I did: the mountains suit me; those mountains suited me. But socially, I felt marginalized. The director of a nonprofit for which I was interested in working told me he preferred to hire people who’d grown up in town. A manager at the ski school told me people found me “intimidating.” When I attended a party I was invited to by one of my coworkers, another coworker approached me and in front of the others asked, “Why are you here?” (Um…I was invited?)
Of course, these occurrences alone weren’t sufficient to—pardon the pun—cow me among the bison, i.e., to make me feel I didn’t belong. It was a continuous repetition of such occurrences over the decade I lived there that added up such that the whole became greater than the sum of its parts. Besides, the feeling of belonging or not belonging doesn’t necessarily have an identifiable cause; it’s a feeling that rises from somewhere deep inside and refuses to be ignored. It pervades, like the socially constructed timing that is the subject of this post. When the feeling of not belonging is unattended to, it ravages well-being and preys on our profoundest fears of facing hardship alone, living without love, dying alone.
To follow the order and timing by which we’re “supposed” to do things in life doesn’t guarantee belonging, but it is one important initial gateway to it, e.g., “Oh, you’re like me; you’re where I am in life?” It also leads to people who might share similar life stories, which is at least a start for potential connection and belonging. People are drawn to each other, of course, for more ineffable reasons than simply sharing a sense of timing. However, just like fishes making one another’s acquaintance in an aquarium, it would be naïve to think it doesn’t always play some role in forming relationships and community and, in turn, in aiding mental and social well-being. Such that, say, the self- and life-questioning that are parts of midlife crisis can feel a little less like an actual crisis.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged”
I spent two years at the college from which I graduated, starting just weeks before I turned 25. To my knowledge, 25-year-olds, immersed in the adult world, tend to be among the youngest. By contrast, in the singular world of my small rural college, at 25 I was comparatively well past my prime—and I felt it every day.
Maybe the most important education I received in those two years was how to function within that feeling. (I continue to work to improve at this—writing this post is part of that.)
As a transfer student, I was required to attend orientation with the entering freshmen, who mostly were straight out of high school. I had supported myself for several years in a major city, and had gained a wealth of life experience in that time, as well as from my previous years in university. Just like Brianne in my writing class as a college first-year, I easily passed for any age between eighteen and twenty-one, and knowing this I let my guard down. I attended all of the orientation events. I hung around my dorm’s common areas and struck up conversations with other students. At meals in the cafeteria, I boldly approached any tables with students who seemed interesting and sociable and asked if I might join them. Mostly, I felt welcome, and liked the people I was meeting.
But then it started happening. Not once, but at every meal where I sought new people to sit with: We’d all be chatting, and then I’d say something—I never knew what—that made the other students pull back with questioning looks in their eyes. There’d be a pause in the conversation, and invariably one of the students would say to me, and only me, “Wait. How old are you?”
I considered lying. After all, it was just a number. But that was just it: My age was just a number, and really, what did four years’ age difference from the “usual” oldest undergraduate age really matter?
Besides, I remembered summers at music camp in my early teens, where there was a violin student in her forties who was much less advanced than most of the rest of us. She lived off campus and we only saw her at the weekly masterclasses, where she performed a few times. She’d walk onto the stage in jean overalls, high-top sneakers, and her frizzy brown hair in pigtails tied with ribbons. It was clear she was trying to look younger than her lined face, grey wisps, and middle-aged body revealed. Sadly, it only made her seem ridiculous to us naïve and snooty kids. Whereas if she’d been herself and dressed age-appropriately, I think she’d have invited our curiosity rather than our dismissal.
So I decided to be honest. “I’m 25,” I’d say. And all of a sudden the students, who just moments before freely were opening up to the others and me, grew hesitant. Conversation became awkward. Some instances were worse than others, but overall it was evident that among these students, age was not “just a number.”
I remembered that embarrassingly provincial thought I’d had about Brianne all those years ago, that had snaked through my mind in spite of myself: “How can you be 26 and still in college?” I suspected these students were thinking the same about me. I looked like them; I was at the same level of study as they were; I was supposed to be like them—and yet I was not.
There were a few other transfer students who were my age. Some of them were single mothers of infants. They lived off campus, and I was invited to one of their gatherings. They were nice, their babies adorable. The trials and tribulations of parenthood, however, were the furthest things from my mind at that time, so that group didn’t feel like the right fit for me socially.
Then there was someone in my dorm, let’s call her Tina, who also was 25 and previously had worked as part of a traveling theater troupe instead of attending college. She dealt with our age difference from the other students by assuming a teacherly role toward them, as a kind of “mentor” especially for the theater students. To sit with Tina and the other, younger students at meals in the cafeteria meant hearing her lecture about her theater troupe adventures as though we were attending a compulsory faculty talk. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting, but it made other conversation difficult. Also, Tina clearly assumed that her greater age equated to greater knowledge and experience, about life and theater both. It either was her assumption, or she used that “elder-wiser” stance as a defense.
It might be true that with age comes greater experience, and with that, greater maturity and wisdom, but it’s not a certainty. I always hated when people older than I was automatically assumed they knew more than I did. And many times, naively or rightly, I felt sure I knew more. I wanted at least the chance to participate in conversations as an equal. As the older one for the first time in my life, I wanted to interact with the other students as an equal, to be as curious about them as I hoped they might be about me.
They weren’t curious at all, however. Or if they were, they didn’t show it. Maybe they judged me for being older and not positioning myself as wiser the way Tina did. Maybe they thought my being older and in the same stage of their education as they were meant I had gone about things all wrong, that I wasn’t someone they could respect. And, given my difference from them, that I wasn’t someone they could look “out with,” as in, out onto the world with, as contemporaneous compatriots experiencing life’s milestones together.
My first semester, I enrolled in an oil painting studio course called, “The Fundamentals of Painting.” I’d never painted, not even with watercolors, save for a few ambivalent creations here and there in early childhood. Consequently, I still drew like a first grader. I took the course because I wanted to experience a new art, to see how it might inform my trained and practiced arts of music and writing. The course description didn’t say beginners weren’t welcome.
Unfortunately for me—or fortunately, depending how you look at it—the entire class was comprised of first-years who all happened to be experienced, talented painters. While I shot errant nails into the walls trying to learn how to use a nail gun to assemble my canvas frame and posing a safety hazard to my classmates, my classmates lit up their taut canvases with color.
Every week, we had to hang our completed painting assignments on the wall for class critique. There would hang my lumpy, cartoonish tomato, or my even lumpier potato, or my “Scene from the Galaxy” that looked less like art than like a paint-spill accident in a kindergarten classroom. We all responded with enthusiasm to the ubiquitously impressive work of the other students, but each one of my efforts left my classmates speechless.
Coughing. The sound of weight shifting from one foot to the other. “I like…how you chose to do a close-up of the top of the tomato rather than the whole tomato.”
Silence for fifteen seconds. Another cough. One student tracing a line on the linoleum floor with the toe of her shoe.
“Um…I appreciate that you experimented with painting the tomato’s shadow.” Deft choice of words there—“experimented with painting” rather than just “painted,” because the shadow looked less like a shadow and more like my tomato had had an accident.
I’m sure that in the weekly critiques, my face was at least as red as my clumsy tomato. It dawned on me that I was to this painting class what that middle-aged violin student was to our masterclasses all those years ago. And see my word choice here? “This painting class.” “Our masterclasses.” In those masterclasses, I felt like I belonged.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” the saying goes, and it seemed that all had come full circle, with me bearing the judgment I’d unintentionally, ignorantly, even in spite of myself, placed on Brianne, and in my younger, greener, hopefully more excusable years, on the middle-aged violin student.
The importance of affirmation, being a beginner, and being seen
I didn’t necessarily expect, as a painting neophyte, to belong amid students who were experienced painters. I felt I belonged in the masterclasses as a teenager because already by then, and like my same-aged peers, I’d spent years studying music, I was on a professional track to be a musician, and I’d worked hard. I knew you must earn your way to belong among skilled practitioners of a sport, art, or academic subject, through a consistent willingness to learn and to improve and with ever-increasing skill to show for it.
I began asking my classmates for help. Linda, a redhead who always wore paint-splattered jean overalls, taught me how to dumpster-dive for art supplies in the set of huge dumpsters behind the building. Wood for canvas frames, scraps of perfectly good sandpaper, enormous strips of canvas unmarred by the tumble of trash…. I couldn’t believe what people threw away. Darron, who had his own private, tiny studio space like all third- and fourth-year painting majors, let me watch him paint while he told me what effect he was striving for. He introduced me to acrylic paints and Egon Schiele. In this way, I began to establish camaraderie with the students in my class.
My paintings, however, continued to leave them speechless.
I had to learn to be okay with that. It’s funny now, to remember my classmates’ silent bewilderment at seeing my paintings on the wall with theirs, like deformed pigeons amid exotic birds. But back then, it felt alienating. I saw quickly I wasn’t going to receive welcoming affirmation from my peers-who-were-not-peers. That was freeing, in a way. I didn’t need their affirmation, did I?
No. I needed to be seen, and that’s something much more real and lasting than mere affirmation. But it’s also more rare, and so affirmation often serves as a palliative to fill in for its absence. There would be no such palliative for me, in this painting class, and maybe not even in my entire two years at this college. Without that, I had no choice but to focus on my own path, and not worry about whether I was fulfilling expectations for what I “should” be doing, and at what time. The facts were the facts: I was an older college student at a small, fairly homogenous, insular rural college; I stood out; and this simply was what I was doing and where I was in my life; and as a mere single chapter in my life story, it did not define me.
In this way, the painting class taught me how to be a beginner. Which, as we grow older, is about the most “out of sync” we can be, and yet it might be the most generative mindset anyone can adopt.
The painting class also began to teach me (because years later, I’m still learning this lesson) how to be different, and to be neutral about it—that is, neither proud nor ashamed of it, but merely accepting of it, and honoring it by aiming not to be derailed by what anyone thinks of me, my work, or my life path and choices.
When in Rome…
When you’re the odd one out, you are the one who must assimilate. You can’t expect people to meet you where you are. You have to meet them where they, the majority, are. You must, as my long-ago partner Alex said, “contort,” or at least appear to while you maintain an effort—undercover when necessary—to remain true to yourself. This dual and often cognitively discordant effort requires a lot of energy; it’s exhausting to do all of the bending while no one bends to you. I soon came to dread going to meals in our college cafeteria, though it was all the time that I felt like a lumbering brontosaurus amid a student body our artsy, small New England liberal arts college proudly would classify as a collection of unicorns.
And lest I thought this only was my experience as an older student in a degree program, recently a writing mentor of mine told me that when she was in her writing MFA program fresh out of undergrad, there was one older person, probably no older than her mid to late thirties, to whom none of the other MFA students referred by name. Many of them didn’t even know her name. They called her, “The Lady.” I can only imagine that The Lady’s MFA experience was rather lonely.
Eventually I decided that subjecting myself to this social awkwardness three times a day, every single day at meals, as well as in my classes and in the dorms, was more than I could bear. Instead of eating lunch and dinner in the cafeteria, I started going to the college snack bar for my meals. Two pieces of whole wheat toast, each topped with slices of green bell pepper and provolone cheese gently softened in the snack bar’s cubby-sized toaster oven, set open-faced on a paper plate and covered tightly in aluminum foil so that I could carry it to my dorm room to eat in peace—comfortably, alone, and unseen.
After one too many repetitive snack bar meals, I turned to one of my professors, Katherine, for help. She also was the college president, and a known maverick: She had abolished presumptive tenure, fired one third of the faculty, and eliminated academic departments in her first years as president, drawing national attention and reams of criticism, some of it quite vitriolic. Yet her actions helped save the college and make liberal arts education relevant for the twenty-first century, and ultimately she was praised for her vision by former President Bill Clinton, among many others.
Ever pragmatic, incisive, to the point, and intolerant of BS, her advice to me was this: “Always do what you need to do for you. If you’re coming from a place where you’re trying to drag others down to pull yourself up, that will become evident over time. Likewise, if you’re remaining true to yourself and your actions are in alignment with the best of your beliefs, that also will become evident over time. Above all else, trust in yourself.”
Easier said than done, of course. I was encouraged by the way she herself exemplified what it looks like to live by that advice. When we had this conversation I had two-and-a-half semesters left of college. In that time, though I’d returned to eating my meals in the cafeteria with other students, I did shrink away socially. I immersed myself in my work. My social withdrawal partly was why I feared that no one would cheer for me when I approached the podium at graduation to receive my diploma. Everyone only knew me from my outspoken participation in classes.
When my name was called and I heard the swell of cheers and applause, it seemed to confirm that despite my two years of bumbling like Goldilocks as I struggled to find my place as an older college student, I had managed to land on what was, if not “just right,” then just right enough. The applause suggested that just maybe, it was like Katherine had said—that to my peers, what I was about had indeed become evident over time.
You can’t ignore the pull of the need to belong
Katherine said something else that particularly stuck with me. I was fretting over what I’d do after graduation—which is to say, what I should do, so that I could get back in sync—and finally Katherine snapped. She wasn’t angry; she had these very grandmotherly, kind brown eyes that let you know you always were well regarded; but she was, as I said, intolerant of BS, had just gotten a whiff of mine, and wasn’t having it.
“My God, Charlie, will you get over it already?” she said. She leaned across her desk toward me. “You will never, ever, ever be conventional. Do you understand? You will never be conventional, and you need to stop thinking you could.”
It might seem to have been a compliment. Doesn’t everybody want to be unconventional—at least, in the US, and maybe elsewhere where the call for individualism is strong? It wasn’t an insult; Katherine didn’t bother with compliments or insults but instead simply told the truth. It was why some people loved her. It also was why some people hated her. I found it refreshingly educational—some of the best education I’ve ever received.
Her words cut me as though they’d severed my aorta. They felt like a damnation. They stung like forced exile. They reverberated like the sound of my best friend slamming the door in my face.
What I heard wasn’t that I was my own person. Rather, it seemed Katherine was observing that I’d never belong. That my experience of the past almost two years would be my experience always. That I’d always feel a little lonely and out of sync relative to my milieu, and maybe even always be alone.
Remember the story of the cow in Poland that escaped her farm enclosure and joined a herd of wild bison? Well, there’s report of another cow in Poland who early in 2018 escaped her farm on the day she was to be slaughtered. She ran through the woods and emerged at the edge of a lake, with her captors in pursuit. So, she swam across the lake to one of a cluster of islands. When the farmer arrived with the local fire brigade to retrieve her, she swam to the next island. The farmer gave up on catching her, but her market value was too high for him to let her die. He regularly delivered food to her, until a local governor offered the cow sanctuary on his farm, not to kill her, but to protect her, as she’d become a bit of a sensation in the community and had been named, “Hero Cow.” Unfortunately, the rescuers’ attempt to catch her was so stressful for the cow that she had a heart attack and died.
I felt like that cow, too. It was speculated that this cow died because unlike the other cow, she never found a herd to be a part of. My fear was, what if I never found a herd to be a part of? What if I always was out of sync, outside my milieu, seen as therefore “out of whack,” and forced to face life mostly alone?
That fear has been my shadow through most of my adult life. It’s a black hole, a pit of tar, that tugs at me with fretful, twisted fingers like the twine of a noose. It’s the abyss whose terrifying emptiness is the measure of how powerful our need is, as social animals, for connection and community. It’s the fear that pulled me into graduate school immediately after college, where I hoped to become a literature professor as the “respectable” professional identity I could wear like a social-acceptability badge—See, everyone? I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing!—while I quietly pursued my dream of being a writer.
Had I managed to resist the tug of that fear, I might have eschewed graduate school in favor of writing my first book, of which I’d already written a few chapters. But I don’t blame myself for heeding that fear. It’s a primal aspect of human experience, that plays a hand in all our lives in some way. Resisting that fear simply isn’t always possible or even desirable. Were we able to fully suppress our need for community, connection, and belonging, much of our humanity would be suppressed with it. This is the problem with those thoughtless, Hallmark-card injunctions to “forge your own path” and “not be afraid to stand apart from the crowd” that smack us from all corners like a syrupy marketing campaign for living a good life. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that they don’t acknowledge how oppositional to our instinct for self-preservation it can be, and thus it’s much, much, much easier said than done.
When I lived in the mountains and started going on solo hiking and backpacking trips in all my free time, I took a lot of photos that I shared on my social media. People commented all the time that I was so “brave,” “adventurous,” and “independent.” What they didn’t know is that those traits, if indeed they were traits of mine, weren’t what first drove me into the wilderness. I started going on solo adventures for want of someone to talk to. I was going through a bad time. As my circumstantial despair grew, my feeling of not quite belonging in my mountain social milieu meant I felt even less connected, because if I couldn’t comfortably share even the small, superficial things with the people around me, I surely couldn’t share how low, how hopeless, I felt. That was too intimate and intense. Even I couldn’t bear the unending bad feelings; they made me restless. The restlessness was what drove me into the wilderness.
Over time, I found solace in the solitude—the long, peaceful jaunts on secluded trails, the cool nights with the glittering show of unobstructed stars all to myself. Recently someone said to me, remarking on my solo treks, “Oh, you’re so strong and independent, you don’t get lonely. You don’t need people’s approval.”
“That’s not true!” I said. “Just because I am independent doesn’t mean I don’t crave other people’s company, or approval.”
One thing doesn’t necessarily mean, “not the other.” I wish that weren’t so easy for us to forget. One can have an independent spirit and crave belonging; they don’t cancel one another out. A funny thing about our and maybe other species is that belonging to “the herd” isn’t always salubrious. Sometimes breaking away is the only way a person can save themselves.
Take that first cow, for example. I’m anthropomorphizing, I know, but I suspect she didn’t leave her herd on the farm because she lost her herd instinct. She left her farm herd because something about it was inhibiting her in some way she could not tolerate. Once in the wild, she could have chosen to pursue a solitary life. But instinctively she found her way into another herd. By appearances, the bison and their way of life suit her better than her herd on the farm, because she never has returned to her old home.
When we choose a path—or a path chooses us—that places us out of sync with the norms of our social milieu, we have to be prepared for how we’ll respond to that inevitable tug, that instinctual need, for belonging. The rewards of stepping out of sync are a deeper sense of fulfillment and a stronger relationship with ourselves, which are invaluable. There’s also the possibility of stronger connection and community among people, even if a scattered few, with whom we truly resonate, who not only “approve” of us but really “see” us. But it’s only ever a possibility, not a guarantee, and the question is, how will we weather the bouts of loneliness? Asking that question seems like the most realistic way to cope with being out of sync, whether it’s by choice, or by the necessity of us being who we are, with all our unique, beautiful deviations from the so-called norm.
It all comes down to dreaming, and adapting
Have you ever stared into an aquarium of fishes, to find at least one fish staring through the glass right back at you? I’ve always wondered what they might be thinking. (Yes, I’m anthropomorphizing again.) Are they merely staring at their own reflections? Or are they seeing through the glass, regarding the waterless world in which we live, where our floors are covered in rugs and carpets rather than gravel—and regarding us, these strange, flat-faced creatures with no scales or fins, living where their meals don’t magically drift down from above?
If they do see through the glass into our world, do they ever think, “Hmmm, I’d like to explore what’s out there?” The cool thing is that, far back in evolutionary history, a predecessor to the modern lungfish adapted to the bouts of low oxygen in the stagnant pools of their swamp home by hoisting itself onto dry land. The result over time were limbs in place of fins, and our modern amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
In other words, we humans came into being because long-ago lungfish ventured where they didn’t “belong.”
On the other side of the aquarium glass, humans have found the intrigue of the aquatic world irresistible. First it was solely for food, sponges, subterfuge, ship repair, and treasure, but as we evolved technological means to remain underwater longer and dive deeper, we ventured beyond the surface of oceans, seas, and lakes not out of necessity, but for the sakes of curiosity, science, and pleasure. We are not any nearer to being aquatic beings than we were in ancient times when we had only the option of freediving. We do not “belong” in the water. But as our population continues to grow, who’s to say we won’t evolve or devise a way for entire communities of people to live in the sea?
Whether we’re cow, fish, or human, living creatures are meant to expand beyond their natural environment; living creatures are meant to resist being caged. Environments and ecosystems change; how could life exist if all forms of it could not find ways to change with them, if all forms could not escape what limits them? Life is designed to adapt. It’s just that not all life chooses the most optimal adaptations, and thus some life perishes, while some flourishes. For people, there’s just as much risk in keeping in sync with societal expectations as there is in falling out of sync.
So really, then, “Timing is everything” just as air is everything for us and water is everything for fishes, but it turns out it can’t be everything. Adaptation must come to the rescue to fill in the spaces that an adherence to socially sanctified timing sometimes cannot. And for creatures—for we humans—to adapt, we must allow ourselves to dream.
If you think about it, we actually start our lives as a dream, a dream reflecting millions of years of adaptation. As a zygote, each of us is a biologically encoded idea of a full human being, with particular traits, tendencies, limitations, and potentialities that will help determine who we each become. Our “becoming,” unique to each of us, is our own dream, one we’re fulfilling in fits and starts whether we’re aware of it or not. As our need to belong exerts a pull on each of us, so does our dream.
This is why, I think, it’s easier to relate to situations where we’re the youngest or least experienced, trying to fall in sync with people who are older or more experienced. Carrying and embodying our dream, we enter the world and are looked after by adults and maybe also older siblings who reflect our dream back to us, both of who we want to become, and who we don’t want to become. Being the youngest and the least experienced is one trial every human being in the world and throughout history has endured.
When I was eight, I was the youngest camper at a summer-long camp in western North Carolina. Kay, one of the counselors, had stood in front of the entire camp at our morning assembly and announced an upcoming multi-day backpacking trip to climb Mount Mitchell, a peak in North Carolina that’s the highest in the Appalachian Mountains and the tallest peak east of the Mississippi river. “The sign-up sheet will be on the bulletin board,” she said.
As soon as assembly was over I jumped up and darted through the clusters of bigger campers to the sign-up sheet; I filled in the very first slot with my name. I was going to climb a mountain! It was going to be an incredible adventure, the highlight of my summer; I just knew it. The trip was a week away.
But a few days after the trip was announced, Kay approached me outside the camp’s main building at lunch, where I and my friends were eating ice cream cones.
“Charlie,” she said, “I can’t let you come on the trip up Mount Mitchell.”
“But why? I was the first to sign up,” I said.
“I know, hon. But the others who signed up are all much older than you are. The youngest, besides you, is fifteen. I’m just afraid it won’t be very fun for you, being so much younger than the others.”
Are you kidding?! I remember thinking. A trip with all older kids is even more exciting! I was going to get to be a voyeur into the jokes, gossip, crushes, mannerisms, and styles of older kids. As an only child, my usual route into this experience was through my friends’ older siblings, but they usually acted like they were too cool to hang out with pesky younger kids.
Aloud, I said, “I promise I can keep up! Maybe, because my clothes are smaller, my pack will be lighter, and I’ll be even faster than the other kids!”
“I have no doubt you’ll keep up,” Kay said. “But hon, I’m sorry, I can’t let you come on this trip. It’s not safe for you or for the others.”
“But why?” I repeated, as my ice cream trickled down my hand. “You didn’t say the trip was only for older kids.”
“I’m so sorry, hon,” Kay said, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ll have to find another trip. There’s plenty more this summer.”
I slumped away thinking maybe eight-year-olds couldn’t climb whole mountains, and Kay just didn’t want to come out and say so. For various reasons, not necessarily owing to Kay, I didn’t finally climb a mountain until I was in my twenties. I never forgot my zealous anticipation of adventuring up a mountain with the older kids, however, and my love of the other outdoor things I did in my years at camp, and I’ve now climbed literally dozens of peaks over twice as high as Mount Mitchell. What I’ve learned since I was eight is that not only can eight-year-olds climb mountains, I’ve seen five-year-olds—with their parents, of course—climbing mountains and summiting on their own two legs.
I understand now that as a much younger camper than the other kids on that trip, even if I didn’t “need” them to do so, the counselors would’ve had to give me special consideration, and that could have challenged their own and the other campers’ safety. But I also understand that the eight-year-old me was in no way wrong to dream of climbing Mount Mitchell with the older kids.
It was doable, and I could have done it. I was and am headstrong, and had Mount Mitchell been within easy walking distance of camp, like those two Polish cows I might have ventured beyond the limitations placed on me and attempted to climb it on my own. Who knows? I might’ve succeeded. The important thing would be that I held on to my dream—to my excitement over what I might do, i.e., climb a mountain.
The beauty of being young is that youth’s whole premise is to become. Children live to become: it’s in our play (such as pretending to be a princess or pilot or teacher or whatever), our education, and our ever-growing bodies. You’re too young, too small, too innocent, the grown-ups tell us, and though it might seem, with all these protective limitations, that we can’t do much as children, we always dream much.
Children dream. It’s how they fulfill their becoming. Adults sometimes forget to dream, because we’ve been too focused on trying to stay in sync, or to get back in sync if we’ve fallen out. Because we don’t want to “regress,” as it’s not uncommon for us to view returning to the relative “babyhood” of being a beginner at something. Because we fear we’re running of time—which we are, every day of our lives. We lose more than time, however, by no longer dreaming. We lose ourselves.
As Katherine the college president said to me all those years ago, “Always do what you need to do for you…. Above all else, trust in yourself.” Adhering to these edicts can mean staying in sync, or stepping out of sync, depending on what a person needs most at any particular time. Timing might be everything…but it’s also really not.
I really enjoyed this
Thanks so much for reading! If you’d like to be notified of new posts, please subscribe using the link on the bottom of the home page.
Warm wishes,
Charlie
Kewl
I really enjoyed reading this. I especially appreciate the analogies of the runaway cows finding a tribe. One doesn’t often find such a heartfelt expression of the need to belong along with the challenge of at the same time embracing one’s uniqueness and finding a community where that is truly seen.
Rex,
Thanks! I, too, was tickled to discover the stories of the cows. Not only are they fascinating unto themselves, their plight and solutions to it and the different outcomes illustrated exactly what I was trying to express. And it’s so true: Any belonging will do; it’s such a fundamental need…and yet at the same time, not just *any* belonging will do; one needs, like air and water, to be “truly seen,” as you say.
Thanks so much for reading,
Charlie 😉