Tick-tock, ya don’t stop, y’all.

So I made the mistake of looking through my old high school yearbooks the other day.

Ouch. Oooh. Eeek.

I’m not just talking bad hairstyles [plenty of that, though, and if you call me Mushroom Head I’ll kick your ass].

No, no. I’m talking bringing it all back: the loneliness, the isolation, the taunting, the depression, the worrying. That is one place I really, really don’t want to revisit. I don’t know about you all, but Lord, did high school suck.

Sucky McSuck. And pretty much I worked myself into a state all over again — looking back at the yearbook I helped to create, remembering all the hours I put into it, seeing my name in tiny embossed letters on the cover, and remembering how much I felt like an outcast, a loser, a fringe person. A misfit.

That kind of shit doesn’t really go away, does it. No matter how well I did in school, no matter how much fun and how many friends I had in college, it still all boils down to that same lingering feeling, that sense of being on the outside.

Of being most definitely, irrevocably, without-a-doubt not special. Funny, isn’t it, how we all harbor a tiny fragment of “specialness,” how we all figure, somehow, that we’re different — and that one of these days, the world is going to realize our genius. Sure, we may be stuck in crap jobs, in crap towns, with no glamourous future in sight … but dammit, we’ve got potential, huh?

‘Cept we don’t, not really. We’re never going to be famous, never going to be on television or written up in Vanity Fair. We’re never going to be the stuff of hushed, reverent talk or a name to go down in the history books.

We’re Americans, the common folk, the proletariat, the regular ol’ men and women that we think exist somewhere else. The same people who go to work, come home, shop at Target, go to sleep. Not special. Not extraordinary.

Just the masses.

So this thought really got me down for a while — all those top-notch grades and extracurriculars and above-average gifts, the talent in sketching and the way with words, the compassionate ear and the avid interest in — whatever. It boils down to the same old thing: Average. Or average-ish. Unremarkable, indistinct, generic.

So — that’s it, then, and I’m going to run with it. Maybe my job is part-time and not vital to the operations of my company. Maybe I’ll never write a book, edit the New York Times, live in London, drive a Beamer. Maybe no one will remember me in 200 years [maybe? har].

So what? I won’t be around then anyway. What I do got is a nice place to live. I’ve got a washer and a dryer, a man who loves me, my health. I’ve got friends. I’ve got an intact — though vivacious — family. I’ve got a library card, dammit. The CIA’s not after me, I don’t fear the drug cartels, my scandals don’t make the front page news, and no one’s put a price on my head.

An ordinary life is a blessing, indeed.

Final thought: Is it growing up or giving up when you decide to accept your fate as Everywoman?

July 18, 2003 | Filed Under other