"NO!" I objected, spinning a face at the phone screen, thrusting the vacant hand, not holding the Apple device, in the air.
"No, no, no, no! She does not get to do this," I continued in an non-negotiable manner, my jaw agape in astonishment, the veins popping out of my neck.
"How dare she," I raged.
I tried to gather my thoughts, grasping for the right words inside the swirling cloud of frustration, confusion and anger in my mind. I wanted to unzip my skin and climb out of my body and into oblivion.
The woman, seated five rows in front of me, turned around and threw me the skank-eye making a point of my ill-advised subtlety. My tantrum was audible even from her end of the bus.
I had received an email from a girl I knew at school. The group she led treated me horribly for five years and, to put it simply, we were never friends. She had written to me in much the same blithe, joyous way as a child eats an orange to say she was now an advertising manager for an impressive company, running a campaign for a brand and wondered if I'd be willing to collaborate with for her on a particular project.
I was livid.
Giving out stink.
BULLING.
Because this was not where the story was supposed to go. Back when I knew her, she was a rich bullying jerk and nasty and the embodiment of Regina George. Once school ended, her reign was due to stop. There'd be a reversal because she was going to get her comeuppance, experience life from the other side of the coin, end up working in McDonald's as she was inherently evil and needed to comprehend struggle and the plight of being an outcast. The karma chameleon was scheduled to sort her out.
But it hadn't.
And it wasn't right that she had snatched the fancy job title and nice life.
Why wasn't balance being restored?
The good guy was supposed to win, not the baddie.
What was happening?!
School is a funny one, its influence transcends the divides of age. It can become the prism through which you see your life and in doing so has the capacity to ruin it.
Never underestimate its power. It's the identity everyone wants to live down, the approval everyone aspires to. Being able to check the boxes - marriage, career, children, friend circle - is more important at a school reunion than anywhere else, which is why I think the school system, not society, is the reason an idea of happiness got framed that way. It instantly creates that societal world: haves, have-nots, wannabes and freaks. Freaks are those who aspire to other versions of life, who want to march to their own tune. Thanks to this definition of success, they will always be freaks. Freaks forever.
With sweat pooling down the back of my parka, I was grateful to be hitting the Dublin Rd and drawing closer to home; where I could scream obscenities into my pillow without an audience.
I was scrutinising her words, like a scientist examining a specimen. Overloaded with emotion, convincing myself she had only reached out to SPITE me, and it was part of her cunning, elaborate scheme, a plan she'd hatched to make a fool of me and fulfill her own reputation, when all is said and done, as being the one on top, the winner at the finishing line.
And then, in the midst of my fit, it hit me, something solidified. I wasn't assessing the situation rationally, I was getting vacuumed down the rabbit hole of yesteryear, orchestrating drama, trying to stir the pot, clapping back with vinegar, instead of honey.
I blame films, for now.
Not my own immaturity.
It's kind of a dawning realisation, lately that they (shock! Horror! Who knew?!) ...lie.
Real life is not how it is depicted in the movies, and to be fair to movies they never claimed otherwise.
They just insinuated it.
The cinematic stereotypes about school kids and what happens to them after graduation are more well trodden than the taped-up glasses of the school dork beneath the foot of the school bully: popular kids are shallow tyrants whose social success will peak in their school years; dorks are sweet and smart and they will achieve eventual vindication.
It's a lazy convention but I fell for it. Maybe you did too.
I was by no means a popular kid so this defense of them is not some poorly disguised self-justification. But rather, it's just to point out that this trope, aimed at geeky, unconfident, oversensitive teenagers like the one I once was, is false consolation and that is worse than no consolation because it is a lie.
While some kids (and grown-ups, sadly) attain social success through bullying, luck of genetics, rich parents, generosity with sexual favours and simple sporting prowess, most do it through two factors that are simultaneously far more complicated and far more simple: self-confidence and random chance. Frustratingly so much boils down to the unsatisfying formula of good and bad luck.
As to the first of these, yes, self-confidence in school is probably much easier to come by if you are excellent at sports or pretty; it is harder to attain if your only talents are - oh, let's say off the top of my head - having to wear a bra when you're twelve and knowing all the words to S Club 7's Reach. But it's the confidence that brings the coolness, not the athletic ability or the other nonsense.
Operating under this premise reinforces the rigidity of the school caste system because they teach geeky kids that there is no chance of them ever crossing that social barrier, certainly not without the very high risk of mockery and possible physical assault. The best they can hope for is eventual professional success, which smacks oddly of fanatical religious doctrine: suffer now, reap the benefits later. Becoming CEO of a computer company, featuring in a Beyoncé music video - you say tomayto, I say tomahto.
These movies also suggest that being an outcast at school endows one with moral superiority as an adult, which explains the cliche of successful actresses and models (Jennifer Lawrence, Cara Delevingne, Cameron Diaz ...) claiming in interviews that they were such geeks in school, a claim that is usually followed by an insistence that, honestly, they just can't resist takeaways and chocolate.
Not all dorks are adorable martyrs with encyclopedic knowledge about interesting music and inherent genius. They are human. This means some are nice and some are not and some are president of the physics club and some don't know how to spell physics.
Insinuating that the school outcasts are the ones who will grow up better, richer and happier is saying that, actually, it DOES matter what group you were in at school, and it apparently matters even more than the bitchiest queen bee ever realised in her heyday because its importance lasts beyond graduation.
To buy into the idea that it matters a jot what social set anyone belonged to in school, and that it has any bearing on what that person was like at school and is like now completely nullifies any success you get later in life that you can flash at your next school reunion - because you've already let the bullies win.
The slog of life still continues after the triumph, especially after an achievement that is so frequently touted as the end goal in movies. Personally, I'm surprised move divorces don't happen the day after the wedding. Wait, you mean there's still more to the story? And it involves me having to go to the supermarket and pay taxes and wait for the bus? But I though everything was supposed to be sorted and perfect now. Mother FUCK!
SO...
I emailed her back.
Spoiler: The world continued to spin.
And doing that, being part of an exchange where I got to be an adult about the situation - it's changed everything. It took seconds to rearrange the faulty parts of my thinking.
Because my life is like your life and your life is like my life and all the lives of all the people reading this now and those who are not. We are all simply doing our best. There is naff all we can do about the rest of it. It's a rolling stew of fear and need and desire and love and hunger to be loved. We're different and we're the same. Haters gonna hate.
Goddamn that is the biggest ever relief: we are united in our humanness. We all feel thwarted and lost but want to be found again.
Pizza for everyone!
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