Paring Back the Peer Group
Do you remember when you were growing up, those moments when you felt left out from a peer group or even among particular friends within your own group of friends. This isn’t a sense of ‘belonging’ incognito. No, it’s something quite different though I’d concede related in some way, just don’t ask me how!
The thing about being ‘left out’ is it sucks big time because of the worth that we attach to its importance. Which importance? Well, the one where we are the centre of the universe! It even feels worse when we discover quite by accident that we have been, left out I mean.
Over the years I’ve had the reasonable fortune to be somewhat thick-skinned about being ‘tight’ with an in-crowd. As you know, like the poet Denis Glover, I’ve always enjoyed dancing to my own tune. At Primary School I had a natural flair for sports, I was good at it and that saved me the heartache probably, of alot of girlish in-fighting. I’ve got to say, from the outside looking in those cat-fights could be bloody. So mean!
At High School being part of a sporting crowd meant I was oblivious to in-group fraternities despite this being the time when one is more likely to feel their powerful fingernails claw their way into one’s social circles. Boho was alive and well then too!
I was a strange mix, of sporting and the gentler literary mob though I have to confess I did Creative Writing because the teacher was handsome. A sort of ‘back-then’ Olivier Martinez with round tortoise-shell glasses. A modern day McDreamy! Teenage crushes aside I learned the basics of writing well enough. In my later years at High School, a tertiary educator called Roly encouraged that literary bent further. I’m grateful to him for that to this day.
Feeling left out can be a real blessing in disguise because it establishes our backbone and our ability to weight up the way forward for us. Suffice it to say, we’re not always goaded like cattle into a race and our choices negated through the persistent use of an electric prodder.
No, we are able to make more sensible choices because we choose to and if we have the guts to. ‘Being left out’ it only lasts for a moment and in the scheme of your lifetime, that’s a very small time indeed. Get on with it, you’ll be glad you did.
