retiring from (trying to have) coolness
i’m giving up! a short essay about how it’s impossible to balance divergence and conformity in this modern age.
For most of my life, I was hellbent on being cool. Whatever that means.
Coolness seemed so effortless to me. Even though it really isn’t. You’re telling me you didn’t double-check your perfectly poised Instagram post with three slides of you smoking a cigarette and think wow I look so fucking cool? Yeah. Sure.
Immediately, I sound like I’m trying to be “not like other girls.” But it’s the opposite — I’m sick of trying to be “not like other girls.”
At my small Boston liberal arts college where the most popular majors are film and theatre, coolness is synonymous with divergence. If you’re a beach-blonde spends-her-money-on-spray-tans sorority girl, you’ll probably end up socially isolated. You’re seen as conformist, even though, you’re sort of an anomaly in the sea of people trying so hard to be different. What constitutes being different? I don’t exactly know. I can hypothesize — you read books from the 1800s and actually enjoy them. Maybe you shave exactly 1/3 of your eyebrow, or you only listen to French electro-pop with 1,000 Spotify listeners. You’ve risen the liberal arts school social ranks when you’re from Germany, you speak 3.5 languages, and smoke cigarettes instead of drinking water. And of course dress like you bought your clothes from a thrift store that no one’s ever heard from (even if half of your clothes are from Shein and Zara, you’ll never admit it). If there’s something that makes you feel unique but somehow careless, you’re cool. At least to me.
At my waterfront suburban Long Island high school, it was largely the opposite. You fit in if you went on fancy vacations to islands with clear blue waters and took pictures in whatever flimsy bikini was trending at the moment. You fit in if you had a $500 balayage and a bat mitzvah that cost more than most of America’s mortgages. And more than all, you automatically fit in or you didn’t. You couldn’t crack the code to the social strata, break in, and climb up the ranks with your hands and feet. If you were a loser (like me… duh) you were basically destined to be a loser. It was just in your genetics. Your DNA.
My experiences in high school and college have revealed to me that there’s no grand design to being cool. I just have to adapt to wherever I am, and desperately pray I don’t appear too weird to sit next to. But usually, I fall back to the bottom of the social strata. I’m starting to think it’s of my own doing.
I can blame it on capitalism, more specifically microtrends — short-lived fads that play into our short attention span and endless desire to consume. I can blame it on misogyny, which makes women feel that they have to conform so badly to please men and have a place in the world. But I’m blaming it on myself.
Trying to be cool is just … so much effort. I can’t maintain the perfect art of delicately balancing fitting in while also being admirably unique. And, sometimes, I think I love being a loser. If you’ve ever been uncool in school, you can identify everyone else who’s licking the grime of the bottom of the social ladder and feel allegiance with them. I don’t think I want to give up that allegiance. As high school drama movie as it sounds, I don’t want to give up …being a loser.
I’ve convinced myself I can be cool if I wanted to. When I first started college, I wore short sleeves and showed off my tattoos and the blonde streak in my hair, and I talked people up, and I was told I was cool. Yes, really! But I’ve given up on rolling up my sweater sleeves in the winter to prove my arms are sparsely tattooed. I don’t think my nose ring and occasionally eclectic music taste can get me very far. I’m retiring from curating my personality. Occasionally, I have the urge to dance in my mirror to Taylor Swift, and forget about how that taints of my necessity of my annual Spotify Wrapped demonstrating my solely-indie taste. Sometimes, I want to break the chains of post-2016 social norms and scream-sing Hamilton, and forget about how that affects my stupid social reputation.
I’m 20 years old. Nearly 21, if I reluctantly tell you the truth. I shouldn’t care about any of this. Except I do. Maybe it’s the long-lasting effects not yet studied of reading Warrior Cats in elementary school and having an undying allegiance to memorizing Dear Evan Hansen in middle school, but I’m destined to be a loser. Maybe 5 double shot drinks, a low cut dress, 400 developer hair bleach can’t heal my inherent unpopularity. And I’m okay with that.
This was likely written in stone when I militarily manned an Ariana Grande fan account on Instagram for three years, but I’ll say it — I’m surrendering to my inability to rise floors on the skyscraper of young adult social life. Perhaps this essay pushed me down a floor or two.