FLASHBACK: A Seat at the Cool Kids’ Table

I was never a cool kid.

I spent most of grade school in the library. I wore big frame glasses and not the hipster kind that are in style now. I’m talking about the plastic kind of glasses that my mom bought for me because finishing the chapter I was currently devouring was way more important to me than remembering not to roll over my glasses while sleeping.

I got such good grades in Algebra II that my best friend and I received a scholarship to Pre-Calculus in summer school, and we happily attended. We were a special kind of nerd. My junior year of high school, I transferred from a small, safe, homogenous private school to a large, diverse public high school. The first day, I wore a flower dress with tube socks and K-Swiss sneakers. I loved books more than fashion.

As I walked into the cafeteria, I passed all the typical tables: jocks, cheerleaders, pretty girls, thugs and those who wanted to be gang affiliated, the goth and pierced, the drama club, the weirdos, and then there was my table. We were a mix of nerd, splash of goody-two-shoes, with a whole lot of down-to-earth girl mixed in.

Since my first day of kindergarten, trying to become the one who gets to split the graham crackers down the perforated line, I’ve been searching for cool. It felt like some exclusive club you had to belong to, a secret society with handshakes, hairstyles, and passwords.

In elementary school, I traded my snacks for cool currency. In sixth grade, I tutored junior high football players in spelling, hoping to add some points to my cool account. In eighth grade, I tried crushing on the coolest, newest guy in school, following behind his kente cloth, Cross Colours, short set on the way to Pre-Algebra class. In high school, I baked cupcakes for the football players, handing them out with a smile on Fridays before pep rally.

I needed that seat at the cool kids’ table. I wanted to be invited, validated, and approved of. I wanted someone to tell me I was smart enough, pretty enough, good enough, and cool enough. I wanted to belong. I still do.

One day, we grow up, leave our high school and college lives behind to experience “the real world” but like our younger selves, most of us are still searching for our coveted seat at the cool kids’ table. We find ourselves jockeying for position, competing against people that we assume, based on their Facebook comments, Twitter posts, or Pinterest pins, have to be way cooler than us.

Now that I’m far removed from my high school self and have learned that K-Swiss sneakers don’t match with every outfit, I’ve discovered the cool kids’ table is an illusion. I’ve worked long and hard to be considered popular or acceptable, only to find out that I would either work indefinitely to stay in someone else’s cool graces or that the only way for me to keep my seat at their version of the cool kids’ table was to try and be anyone else except myself.

The definition of cool is not to meet some impossible standard or desperately try to fit in. The true definition of cool is to be your unique self and to accept others as they do the same. This means coolness isn’t this exclusive club we should try to earn our way into. The cool we’ve been searching for is all around us even when we don’t recognize it. Our community: the artists, leaders, entrepreneurs, pastors, poets, weirdos, nerds that we have the privilege to call friend; the people who love, challenge, encourage, question, push and support us, they are our cool kids’ table.

Maybe instead of trying so hard to impress, flatter, or compete with each other, we should gather a diverse group of people around our dinner or coffee table. Maybe we should decide as leaders that one of the rules for our cool kids’ table is that no one gets rejected just because they think, look, or dress differently from us. Maybe the only rules for our cool kids’ table are good conversation and delicious food, mixed with love, grace, and acceptance.

So pull up a chair. I’ll bring the books and the K-Swiss.