Outsider Shame and the Great Sorting

You start off at a neighborhood school around the age of five and for the next six years or so, you advance in the company of kids you know. The composition of different classrooms may change slightly from year to year but most of the faces remain the same. The ground beneath your feet feels more or less stable and you trust it, most of the time.

 Around the age of 12, at least in the United States, you find yourself swept along in the educational current toward a much larger school where different tributaries meet. You no longer spend your days with a single teacher in the same small pond, but flow along the halls from subject to subject, swapping teachers, understanding yourself for the first time to be but one small stone in a slurry. It feels deeply unsettling; for some reason, everybody else seems to assume you’ll take it in stride.

 Back in grade school, or primary school, or whatever it happens to be called today, we already played in diverging groups, but the divisions didn’t seem so implacable as they do in middle school. Without knowing how it happens, we find ourselves falling into new groups, some we choose, others forced upon us. The great sorting has begun – an undeclared but inescapable ranking when you first come to understand your place.

Band and orchestra boys usually stand at about the middle … unless they’ve already discovered how an interest in the right kind of edgy music raises your status. Not one of them will ever be elected class president. Misfits drift to the bottom like sediment – non-conformers with no statement of defiance to make, physically uncoordinated or socially awkward boys who can’t seem to find common ground with anyone. Stoners occupy a lowly rank but they affect not to care.

 What do they call them now? – those golden boys who rise to the top around this time. Is it still about muscle and sport, and loud voices that carry? These are the boys who always win the social prize, even if we no longer call it Prom King. I knew it, maybe you knew it too, that you’d never be anything like them, nor belong to the favored groups they dominated. Since forever you’ve sensed it but didn’t really know it as a fact until now. In your spare time, you probably spend hours on your phone. Or play video games. Or whatever it is boys do today to not feel lonely and defective.

Maybe you lurk at the edge of several third-tier groups, hoping they’ll let you in. If you’re lucky, you might find a place among the drama kids. Or perhaps you’re the odd card left over after all the deck has been dealt. It’s not entirely new, of course. You’ve had that left-out feeling before – those things where most everybody else went and you weren’t invited. Conversations you couldn’t quite hear from such a distance. Walking home alone after school. You might have been an outsider before, but it was nothing like this.

 You. Are. Different.

You’ve always been different, but back in the olden days, different didn’t seem so bad. People might have laughed sometimes when you spoke but it wasn’t always in a mean way. Nothing could feel worse now than the spotlight, drawing attention to the unfathomable ways you differ.

I’m not normal.

You have no clear idea what this means, not exactly, but it lies at the heart of your belief system. In hindsight, it might have helped had you noticed the other odd people all around. But after holding the bits of yourself together, and keeping your head above water, you had little room left over to notice anyone else.

 Evolutionary psychology tells us that our capacity to feel shame has survival value. Shame hurts, and because we feel it whenever we find ourselves left out or excluded, we do everything we can to belong. We respect tribal norms and the lessons our history has taught us, about how to survive and thrive. No freeloaders. Everyone follows the same rules. Mind the hierarchy, especially when you’re a boy. In our prehistoric past if we didn’t obey the rules, we’d find ourselves shunned – excluded from the tribe’s protection, from the sharing of resources, from companionship. Death was a possibility.

To this day, the dread of experiencing such shame helps us to behave.

But even if we do what’s expected and play by the rules as best we understand them, we might find we still don’t belong. No one need bully or intentionally exclude us to make us feel ashamed, because being on the outside of a group to which you’d like to belong is the  very definition of shame. It makes you feel defective. There must be something terribly wrong with you because otherwise, you’d belong inside with the normal kids. The tribe should probably dump you at the trail’s edge and continue its migration unimpeded by your dead weight. This is not what you really want but sometimes it feels inevitable.

What, after all, is the point of you?

It’s not just the proto-gay boys who feel shunned. Some kids might be overly focused on numbers and react badly to minor changes in the routine. Maybe the interior workings of other people make no sense to you. Or maybe you’re just weird. Back in my day, there were boys who carried slide-rules and wore pocket protectors full of pens; super-intelligent boys who conducted non-stop pun-a-thons on the after-school bus back to our neighborhood. I didn’t belong to that tribe either.

Or maybe something really bad happened to you when you were little, and the effort not to remember anything about it has stunted you. It might have happened a lot. Even if you’ve almost managed to forget, you have no doubt you’re damaged in a way that makes you different from everyone else. Even before somebody actually spat it at you, you thought of yourself as a “loser” or some such word. You fear you’ll never belong, not anywhere.

And then, one day, you stumble across an astonishing, uplifting video on YouTube. Not that very day but eventually, you’ll come to believe that you’ve at last found your tribe.