Lame Acceptance 101

Let’s get one thing straight: all the talk about your late teens-early twenties being a terrifying skydive into adulthood where you realize halfway through the free fall that your parachute is defective is completely accurate. None of us know what we are doing, except that small sector of girls who are really into selling Arbonne, or maybe they are in the same boat as the rest of us and we just don’t realize it because their newsfeeds are purposeful vessels for marketing their brand instead of a long stream of relentless meme-tagging. I’m going to get a long comment thread from the Arbonne community, assuring me that they don’t know what they’re doing either, because for some reason, in this day and age, no-one wants to be thought of as the one who actually kind of has a grip on life. Millennials and their pesky iPhones are probably to blame.

Anyway, despite all these feelings of lostness in the adult world that manifest themselves equally in attitudes of resignation and panic, your late teens-early twenties are actually kind of great. Keep in mind that this is coming from the ultimate pessimist, so you know it must be true. (Pessimism is beautiful, you are always either right or pleasantly surprised. I’m able to stay friends with people because I assume they will fail me when I meet them, and then when at last they do, I’ve already been at peace with it for months. Sure this outlook causes you to plunge into a nihilistic spiral from time to time, but so do optimism when it doesn’t work out.)

Ok, this was going somewhere, before I got distracted by how cool and edgy I am for always seeing the glass half-empty and explana-bragging my worldview to death. Oh yeah, why this part of life is great: you finally accept that you are not cool, and you never will be.

I can only speak for myself and a handful of close associates here. I know there are people who learned this lesson earlier in life, (hurrah for them), people who won’t learn it until they are thirty (be patient with them in the meantime), and people who will never learn this lesson. This last category is typically full of men whose fathers never told them they loved them, and who let them try a cigarette when they were eight. Be patient with them too. They have not had your advantages in life.

But for me, I started my journey to lame-acceptance by finally deciding to believe I was pretty freaking cool. (Pause here for my mom to make her disapproval noise because I used the word freaking. Ok, proceed.) Oddly enough, lame-acceptance and cool-realization are always synonymous when done correctly. Just before I went to bed on the night before my 17th birthday, I said to all the guests at my glitter-themed slumber party celebration (yeah, it was lit), “Just so everyone knows, when I turn seventeen, I’m going to become instantly beautiful, so don’t be alarmed when we wake up in the morning and you don’t recognize me.”

It was a joke made by a burgeoning egomaniac, but it was an Ebenezer raised to the fact that I was tired of doubting my own beauty because my sister had a better jawline and all the boys were in love with her and none with me (still true, but now I’m at peace with it.) As ridiculous as it was, it represented a paradigm shift from looking to the outside world to validate whether I was attractive based on how much attention I got, to deciding that for goodness sake, all those mirrors in my life (and as a dancer who spent four nights a week in the studio, I spent a lot of time in front of a mirror) could not be lying. I WAS CUTE, DANGIT. My entire young-adult experience so far can be marked by several key points where I just get sick of believing a lie and just flip the screw-it switch. I am well-aware that not everyone has a screw-it switch, so do not fear if you are one of those born without, you are probably also a person who has a good work ethic and always does their best. I envy both traits. Y’all are the ones who keep the universe glued together. Godspeed to you.

This newfound confidence was kept in check by those days we all have where we just feel ugly, and also an acne problem that required prescription medication (still does, lol there is no hope), but was briefly encouraged by a few boys who had a crush on me during my senior year of high school. Literally nothing came of this, it’s just that home-schooled boys don’t start to notice girls until at least the age of 16, and I was the only girl in one of my classes, which means that they had to notice me. Add to this the fact that, in those days, I was always impeccably dressed, and you have yourself a pretty fool-proof man-snare. I am ashamed to admit that, in those days, I was all about a good man snare. I have since flipped the screw-it switch on that too.

This was the only time in my life so far that I have been the belle of the ball. It has never happened since, but for some reason, whenever I meet a new group of people, I automatically assume everyone is in love with me. I also assume everyone hates me and is only tolerating my presence, but whatever. Y’all know how it goes. It’s because I’m focused on myself instead of focusing on how I might serve those around me. Yeah, I read my C.S. Lewis. I know what my own deal is. I just haven’t gotten around to changing it. Small steps, amirite?

Ok, so this is supposed to be a story about how lame I am and so far it’s only been a massive self-aggrandizing tirade about how beautiful I think I am. But the point is, learning to like my looks was, for me, the key to reclaiming the confidence I had at age 12 before I started becoming self-aware and ruining anything that brought me any joy. Still working on that, but at least now I’m stressed by matters bigger than whether or not boys like me. Idk if that made any sense to anyone but me, but I’m moving on anyway.

At this point, a fatal blow to my self-esteem was probably needed. I got one, but like, in a gentle, gradual way, because the Lord is merciful. I went to Capernwray, and, given what a hit I had been with the home-schooled boys just realizing girls existed, I assumed I would have a string of infatuated young men lining up to declare their love for me.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!

That is not how the story goes. Thank gootness.

First of all, emotionally speaking, I was nowhere near being in a good place to start a relationship, so idk what I would have even done with a string of lovers. Second of all, the ratio of girls to guys in that school was 9 to 1, so anyone who was not, as one shrewd lecturer who saw right through all of us put it, “a mix between Beyonce and Mother Teresa” was getting cut in the first round. And you know what? It was totally fine. I mean, yeah, it was sad to realize that I do not happen to be one of those beacon of light girls to which the moth-men flock, but it is worth noting that just because boys do not flock to you, it does not mean they don’t notice you. I mean, think about it. As a girl, how many boys have you looked at and been like, “Oh, he’s so cute.” A lot. And if you are anything like me, and the worst possible thing you can imagine happening is that the boy you think is cute finds out you think he is cute, that boy will never know you thought he was cute. But that doesn’t mean you ain’t done thunk it. Get my drift? Good moving on.

Another freeing thing about realizing I am not a moth-man beacon, is that, if I was not a beacon in the days when I was young, thin, never seen in public without make-up, and had long hair (you can hide a lot of evil with a good head of long, beautiful hair. You can have the face of a crone, but if you have luxurious locks, it confuses and dazzles the men-folk into thinking you are beautiful. This is getting really misandrist and I’m so sorry, but I’m also not wrong.) then I was completely powerless, and free to live life as a happy spinster until the chosen one comes along when I’m 27 and totally gets everything about me. Capernwray cured me of a lot of things, but it definitely cured me of my need for male attention and praise Jesus hallelujah for that. Now I can just, oh, I don’t know, see boys as people, and be normal friends with them, you know, like a normal human being. The Alpha-female complex is being re-channelled toward more healthy pursuits.

So the whole How I View Guys Thing™ was an important milestone on the road to being joyfully and contentedly lame, but the friendships I made at Cape were mega-influential too. For one, my friend group first semester was comprised of gamers and theatre kids, a.k.a. people who are super cool but weren’t cool in high school. True shining examples of how cool people who aren’t wasting their time trying to be cool are. But there was still a good fifth of the student body who I sheepishly watched from the opposite side of the dining hall, in awe of their coolness, and terrified to speak to them, for, while they would certainly be kind, they would never consider becoming real friends with a lowly worm such as I. These were the hipster kids who played guitar and wrote songs and, when purchasing Capernwray hoodies, usually chose forest-green, probably to match their artsy insta photos taken while being one with nature. The crowning jewel of this coolness confection was Arianna Amberg. Literally every girl in the school had a girl-crush on her. She was super indie, and super kind, and super spiritual, and to makes things worse, she was genuine, and just awkward enough to make herself endearing. She was like a cooler, more stylish version of Leslie Knope, and there were many of us who loved her from afar and dared not approach her throne. We all have an Arianna in our lives. Actually, we usually have more than one Arianna. But I am about to tell you something that will make you scoff. You are somebody’s Arianna. I know this, because, after a few months, people started telling me what they thought of me, and I came to realize that there were people in that school who viewed me as an Arianna. What the heck? And then, after all my friends got deported (fun times) I ended up becoming friends with Arianna, and finding out that I was Arianna’s Arianna. It’s like the Pina Colada song! No, wait, it’s nothing like that. But I am here today to tell you that, if you manage to muster enough self-esteem to operate under the assumption that you are wanted long enough to make friends with an Arianna, you will learn that even the Ariannas of the world feel awkward, and weird, and like everyone is cooler than them, and want you to please not leave them alone while they try to figure out the coffee dispenser in a room full of strangers. The secret of those people we look up to as examples of everything we want to be is that we are already the same person. Making peace with your own awkwardness is the secret to becoming cool. So make yourself a playlist of all those Hannah Montana and vintage T-Swift jams that still rock your world, turn it up all the way, and invite every Arianna you know to the party, because, yes, they do actually want to come.