Why I Don’t Blame The Cool Kids

Why I Don’t Blame The Cool Kids

The other day a colleague of mine and I were talking about our high school days.

“Were you cool back in the day?” I asked her.

“I was an outcast. People did not like me. You?”

Laughing, “I wasn’t considered cool either.”

For context, my friend is gorgeous. She is the woman that walks into a bar and catches the gaze of everyone in there. She has that type of aura encompassing her.

Her and I took a stroll down Facebook lane and, yeah, she was not that attractive. She had not grown into her body and described herself as anti-social. Expectedly, that combination didn’t get her many friends.

I was much the same way. Rail thin, acne all over my chin and on my forehead, and I made jokes that no one found funny, except myself. Nothing about my appearance would get me into the popular crowd, and once I was cut from the basketball team my junior year I was so far from being invited to parties that I started throwing my own, attended by maybe one or two friends. If you were to ask me then, I would have thought the rest of my life would follow this same trajectory.

“They were such assholes,” she further lamented. “I’m so glad I’m hot now and don’t need to fit into any cliques.” As happy as I was for my friend, I had to disagree with her.

I’m not the type of person that let not being cool in high school have much influence on my future. I’ll be honest: it did suck not being cool at the time, but it was no one’s fault. The reality is that I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t anything to look at (unless you prefer bad haircuts and gangly arms), I didn’t play varsity sports, I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t having sex. Yet, people were still nice to me. I wasn’t picked on and I wasn’t made to feel less than anyone. I told her, “don’t blame them, boo. It wasn’t personal.” And the reality is, it wasn’t personal. She just was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They say timing is everything in life. Back then, it simply wasn’t my time.