Why Is It Always About Me?

Back in my college days, one of my favorite meals consisted of mixing mac n' cheese, tuna fish and cream of mushroom soup. A plate full of this fine cuisine, along with a hefty helping of mustard pickles, and I was a happy camper. To be honest I'd like some right now. Contrary to what this savory delight might imply, I was not studying the culinary arts. I ate my fair share of Top Ramen just like everybody else, but sometimes I got a little creative. It doesn't happen much anymore though, not since my wife threatened to padlock the cabinets. But she hasn't been able to stop me from having my bowl of peaches with a big scoop of chunky peanut butter.

I used to think there was something wrong with me when other people didn't like the same things I liked. I wanted to blend in, not stick out. I wanted to be accepted by others. Who am I kidding, I still feel that way. The way I behave is largely determined by my surroundings and whatever is expected of me. I'm like a social chameleon. I'm pretty sure all of us are that way to a certain extent. But every once in a while there is somebody who breaks the mold.

A friend of mine, we'll call him "Reff" (á la Scooby Doo), recently went to a popular local mall where he sat himself in the outside courtyard, pulled out his guitar and busted out some tunes. Not for any specific reason, he just wanted to do it. Now to me that just doesn't compute. First of all, he hadn't been invited there to play music and, on top of that, he was doing something very different from everybody else. If you can imagine social behavior as a stream of water then he was most definitely swimming against the current. This makes alarms go off in the 'proper behavior' sector of my brain and everything goes into crisis mode. Lights start flashing and I start searching for a bunker to hide in.

So Reff plays a couple of songs and then a security guard shows up. Public recognition that what he was doing was out of the ordinary. To me, there is nothing more terrifying! The alarms are still sounding in my brain as I imagine the situation. The guard politely asks him to leave and I'm thinking, okay, this is where all propriety returns and I can climb out of my bunker. Wrong! Back in the bunker I go. He starts trying to convince the guard to let him keep playing! The guard refuses but Reff still isn't giving up. "What about one more song?", he asks.

Huh!?! The audacity of some people!

Again the guard refuses, so he casually packs up his guitar and leaves. He wasn't angry, I'm pretty sure Reff has never experienced anger in his life, he just went on his way.

So how is it that some people have the gift of behaving out of the ordinary, without regard for anybodies opinion? How do you survive without society's acceptance? I think I stumbled upon the answer a few years ago when I was a missionary. I know what you're thinking "how could this social coward have ever been a missionary?" Well I was.

I've always been overly sensitive to what others think of me. I had lots of good friends growing up but I wouldn't say that I was very popular. I just didn't fit the 'popular' mold. When I was a missionary I still harbored some of those insecurities, but mission presidents don't take that into account when they assign you to a companionship. All of my companions were quite popular in the mission. Everybody knew them and liked them. I felt very insignificant compared to them, not because of anything they did to me, that's just how I felt.

Right here I should interject that in elementary school I was often brutally beaten by little girls. That should explain a lot.

By the way, in case you aren't familiar with LDS missionaries, they always travel in packs of two, known as a companionship. Sometimes it's three, occasionally four, seldom five and almost never six. Unless it's a donut run after district meeting. But, if you ever see seven of them crammed into a Mazda 626 sedan, then you can be assured that there is one more in the trunk. That would be me.

So I observed how these companions behaved around other people. They seemed comfortable in almost any situation. Unlike me, they didn't feel looked down upon, rather they were accepted as equals by their peers. What was wrong with me? Finally one day it hit me; they don't have to be accepted as equals by their peers because they have already accepted their peers as equals. I had been looking at the whole situation backwards. I was waiting for an invitation to be part of the crowd when I should have been inviting the crowd to be part of me. Does that make any sense?

I'd like to say that since having this epiphany I've never felt insecure again, but old habits endure. At least now I know how people, like my friend Reff, can go so unabashedly against the grain without succumbing to insecurity. Still, between him and the security guard, I would rather have been the guard in that situation. Actually, I would rather have been the passerby, pretending not to notice what was going on, but giggling like a bully school girl on the inside.