Pecking Order
I was labeled a nerd and a dork long before I learned to embrace these labels with pride. Back then, pride wasn’t even in my vocabulary. When you are small for your age and chosen last in gym class, there really isn’t much hope.
Socially, the pickings are slim. Fortunately, there were always other misfits to keep me company. However, not all dorks were my friends. There is an unwritten code in the dork kingdom that association with one another doesn’t do a single thing to help the other’s cause. We often avoid one another for the same reason the jocks avoided us.
When you’re on the bottom of the social ladder, you compensate by shunning your own people, while simultaneously feeling yourself gravitating toward them as the only possible source of friendship, while the cool kids either reject you or fail to even notice that you exist.
It was simultaneously hypocritical and a defense mechanism.
A perpetual catch-22.
As a result, I had to endure other dorks who went out of their way to make fun of me just as much as the jocks did, because they were working so hard at being accepted. And so goes the world. A vicious circle.
To compound matters, I had friends over the years who chose to remain closeted when it came to being seen with me, for fear of being taunted themselves. Some of these individuals were fellow dorks. Some were several notches above me in the social pecking order, in borderline cool territory. They would invite me over to play when nobody else was around, but would then ignore me on the playground. Or, if they were playing with me on the playground, the moment another one of their friends showed up, they began taunting me. But I dealt with it because even a part-time friend was better than no friend at all.
Kids used one another mercilessly. For example, I had a Nintendo, but they didn’t. Suddenly, my house was the house to hang out in. But when the Nintendo wasn’t on, they wanted nothing to do with me. I was a single-purpose buddy.
One might ask how I could be so naïve. It wasn’t so much naivety as being star struck by peers that under most circumstances either ignored me or bullied me. Even if I knew it was short-lived, it was still better than nothing. And maybe, just maybe, once they got to know me, they would want to be my friend 24/7, rather than just out of convenience. All it would take was one cool kid to treat me as one of them and perhaps all the rest would fall in line.
So maybe I was naïve.
Back in elementary school, amidst all the bullying I endured, I indulged in a lot of magical thinking. I managed to convince myself that all of my classmates were in on one big joke. One day, I would come to school and they would all yell “surprise!” and suddenly become my friends.
It never happened.
Then again, there was always Dan Wolocko. Dan Wolocko was one of the coolest kids in the class. And one of the most athletic. What separated him from his peers was the fact that he was perhaps the most genuinely nice guy in the entire school. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. And even though he was incapable of bullying me, he could have just ignored me like so many others. However, Dan always went out of his way to include me in playground activities. In gym class, when he was captain, he would sometimes pick me next-to-last, rather than dead last. More importantly, he often stood up for me in front of his buddies when he saw that they were harassing me. All it took was a simple “Guys, c’mon!” and they would step in line and leave me alone. At least, until the next day.
And although I never attended any of his birthday parties and wasn’t even invited over one time, I still can’t ever thank him enough for having my back at school.
As far as those beneath me in the social pecking order, I sometimes avoided them, too. I’m not proud of that, but it was my survival at stake. And I never stooped low enough to taunt them, no matter how desperate I was for acceptance by the popular crowd.
Which meant that I was often friendless. In the warped sense of social status that middle school affords a mid-level dork like myself, I was nestled squarely in a thorny no man’s land.
I’m one hundred percent sure this is why I’m a writer now. After all, there is nothing a writer craves more than attention. Writing was a way to subconsciously defeat my bullies and come out on top, as well as a way for my introverted self to channel my extroverted self. I didn’t have real friends, so I made some up. And really, my imaginary friends were much better than the bullies at school.
Over the years, I came to realize that those guys would suck as friends. Even so, in many ways, those bullies were the best thing that ever happened to me. I learned not to give a shit about what others thought of me. Now, I can look back at all of this stuff and laugh.
And then write about it.
