being cool

I still remember the day in fourth grade when my friends hurt my feelings for the first time.  I’m sure I had been in all sorts of petty squabbles prior to this moment but this is the first memory I can recall…

My two closest friends were in a different class that year and it was the first day of school.  I couldn’t wait to see them and was counting down the minutes to recess.  As soon as the bell rang I raced across the breezeway to stand outside my friends’ class.   I was straining my eyes trying to find them and I remember smiling this huge smile as I saw them walking up to the front of the class together. They were laughing and swiping at each other and I started laughing, too.  It was going to be just like last year!  What fun we were going to have!

They walked right past me.  And ran off to the playground without me.   They hadn’t even seen me.  And they certainly weren’t looking for me outside of my classroom.  I remember standing there for a long time as all of this sunk in.  I felt small, insignificant and stupid.   I walked slowly out to the playground and tried to look like I didn’t care, like I had other things to do.  But I didn’t.  I just watched some other kids play basketball and tried not to cry.  It was the first time I remember feeling like I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t cool enough, fun enough, popular enough.  And I KNEW that I couldn’t let any of it show.  I don’t know how I knew it.  But I did. I had to keep it hidden.

I’m reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (which is excellent, btw) and she’s got a section on being cool.   It’s part of a larger segment of her book on what she calls “vulnerability armor.”   According to Brown, we all use various forms of armor to protect us from being vulnerable, which, she posits, is the key to living a wholehearted life.  One of them she refers to as the shield of cynicism, criticism, cool, & cruelty.    I’ve always thought of coolness as something for the adolescent years, if you were lucky enough.  I clearly wasn’t.  So I figured that wasn’t part of my armory.  But then I read this line…

As adults, we can also protect ourselves from vulnerability with cool.  We worry about being perceived as laughing too loud, buying in, caring too much, being too eager.

…and I thought ahhhh, yes.  

About 10 years ago, Jason and I were helping our friend, Kelly, with an overnight for a group of high schoolers.  Kell was the youth pastor at the time and she somehow convinced us introverts to come along as chaperones.   One of the activities was a human scavenger hunt for the kids at a nearby mall.  The chaperones were all dressed in disguises of some sort and stationed throughout the mall.  The kids had to answer clues and then find us to get their next clue.  Jason and I decided to go gothic so we donned some dark clothing, put on some really dark eyeliner and black lipstick.   I looked like a watered down version of Bellatrix Lestrange.  We didn’t look good.  But I remember that folks gave us a wide berth and I saw people looking at us with curiousity.   I’m embarrassed now to admit it but I also remember thinking this. is. AWESOME.  I love this!  I feel so edgy, so aloof.  It made me feel kind of powerful.  And good.  Cool.

Obviously my day of cool quickly came to an end but I’ve never forgotten how good it felt.  After Gryffin was born, during those long winter days of bleary-eyed nursing, when I was burning the midnight oil every night, I had an epiphany of sorts.  It wasn’t a lightening bolt.  It was a more of a roll out epiphany, this one.  It slowly dawned on me, as I looked down day after day at the little boy in my lap, who had split me open and made me more vulnerable than I thought was humanly possible just by showing up, that I was finally ok being me.   I was ok being me.  It was one of the most freeing, empowering, expanding realizations of my life.

Now, over four years later, I’m still ok being me. I thought, though, that being “ok being me” would translate into never feeling afraid or insecure or less than.  But I still do sometimes.  And occasionally I feel the urge to replicate the feeling I had that day when Jason and I dressed up at the mall; the urge to appear aloof and mysterious, to feel cool, so that I don’t have to show people how desperately I want something, how much something means to me, or how deeply something hurt me.   And I have to fight that urge if I want to live wholeheartedly.   I have to give up being cool.  Shooooot.  Coolness!  It’s part of my armor.  Who knew?!  

 Sorry, couldn’t resist a little HP humor.