No one is keeping score
Though the fashions of 1965 have come and gone, confidence will never go out of style. (Riksarkivet)
Our family truck (we don’t have a family car) is really ugly.
A white Ford F-150, it started its life as an AT&T fleet vehicle, so it has a service body with ambulance doors in the back. It has an orange strobe light and a misshapen, rusty rack on the roof.
It has since served as a makeshift workshop, which led to a splattering of epoxy on the side that will never come off. In an adventure at a Sheetz somewhere in North Carolina, the keys were locked inside, so the driver’s side door is slightly bent from my husband’s (eventually successful) attempts to solve this problem. Due to some mishaps for which I will not assign blame, the front bumper is caved in and the rear one is cracked. In addition, the whole thing is filthy from the snow, salt, and mud of its second Maine winter.
We have the bounty of not caring about the aesthetics of the truck or the optics of our situation. In truth, we fit in here, truck and all. No one is paying attention, and no one is keeping score.
I used to care, and I used to be able to rationalize caring. When I first moved to Atlanta, I drove an old Pontiac Bonneville, purchased from my parents, that my sister had plastered with the stickers of all of her favorite bands. It had no air-conditioning and was so old that it had that boxy look that had been popular in the eighties at a time when all the cars were sleek and curvy. I was so self-conscious as I visited pristine, affluent suburban neighborhoods to teach music lessons, parking at the curb to keep as much distance as possible between my car and the luxury SUVs in the driveway, hoping that my car would not be seen out the window. I didn’t want my car to be a reason that people didn’t hire me.
Looking back, it was perfectly reasonable that I wanted a car with air conditioning in Georgia in the summertime, but totally ridiculous that I cared what these rich families thought about my beater and the economic status it represented. The truth was, it accurately represented my economic status. There was no way I was going to fit in with my clients, and it was okay to not even try. I didn’t realize that they didn’t care about me and my car anyway. They were used to having cleaning ladies, the pool guy, landscapers, and tutors pull up to the house in all manner of decrepit or unkempt vehicles. No one was giving me a second thought.
At The Little Middle School, the students do scrutinize each other, as all peers do. However, any gossip, criticism, or outright mocking that arises actually says more about the person doing the judging than the person being judged. Why should they be a victim of someone else’s insecurity and discomfort? Ultimately, students are free to explore their identity and be as weird and awkward as they please. They’re middle schoolers, after all.
Of course, one can always choose to focus on pleasing the arbiters of taste and fashion in middle school or adult life. It is easy to find people who are willing to make a judgement or score your efforts. But at a certain point, it’s worth asking whether their opinion really matters. In our drive to please the individuals or institutions whose opinions we’ve trained ourselves to defer to, we may hesitate to share who we really are or express ourselves boldly in the world. That is a heavy price to pay for the momentary comfort of appearing to fit in.
Some weird combination of my life experience and the circumstances of the coronavirus has allowed me to inhabit a place where I no longer imagine there to be eyes on me or my choices. It’s gotten easier to just do stuff and not worry about how it is received. However, I see that I’m still nervous to step forward in some new ways: videos, a podcast, Instagram selfies. I still have to fight that residual adolescent self-consciousness that imagines that there will be someone out there rating and ranking my work.
And maybe there will be. Whenever you put something out there, you are opening yourself up to criticism. But at this point, the criticism that really affects me is the hypothetical, pre-emptive commentary in my own head. In reality, there is no one keeping score but me, just as I’m the only one who cared about my scrappy old Pontiac, not wanting to appear to be as broke as I was.
No one is keeping score — and if they are, I don’t have to pay them any mind. I can choose to create and share new things anyway, letting myself be who I actually am, flawed and imperfect as I am.
