Debunking the myth of cool

In the social pecking order of youth, I'd never been "cool". I blame, in part, my parents, for doing their most unintentional best to ensure my sister and I were never hip. We weren't allowed to wear denim. Ever. We weren't permitted to wear anything with a logo, for my father's fear that we would become walking advertisements for unworthy clothing companies. We couldn't watch television during the school week, except for Fridays, when we were allowed to watch both Dallas and The Love Boat. We couldn't hang out at the mall with friends, or go to rock concerts. My parents did this completely out of love, out of wanting us to be individuals, thinking independantly from the crowd. In hindsight, I really respect this brand of parenting. At the time, though, I really resented it. I just wanted to belong. I didn't want the harrassment that was meted out to me by the school bullies for being so shy and awkward. I walked with my eyes cast low, the weight of my misery pushing my head down deep into my shoulders. I hid my pimpled gawkiness between the two curtains of hair that hung in my face. I ate lunch in the school bathroom, with spirals of toilet paper and sexually explicit graffiti for companionship. I hid in my pained nerd vortex. I wanted to be invisible.

They say your teenage years are supposedly the best years of your life. Really? Had I lost my government-issued manual on adolescent enjoyment? Because the bluebirds of my teenage years persistently shat on my shoulders. My clouds didn't have silver linings , only rusted ones. It wasn't so much that my emotional mountains were insurmountable, it was that I just wasn't very cool. Coolness dogged me at every turn. And in high school, it's everything. This all-pervasive myth of cool is what drives us, what aligns us with our cliques, what determines how happy we will be from one day to the next. It's an indescribeable quality that some people genuinely possess, while the rest of us scramble to shopping malls in vain hopes of purchasing the illusion. For me, the idea of being cool was really the absence of loneliness. It was the recognition and acceptance of being different. It was, in reality, a cruel mirage. I was locked in social purgatory, and my only escape was growing up.

But the thing is, even with the passing of time and the coming of age, we are no more immune to the need for cool as we were in high school. We simply have a more disposeable income with which to camouflage our inner, shivering nerds. We can legally drink away our insecurities, blather on about the miseries of irrelevant jobs and opine our socially acceptable left-of-center political views. We can admire Mexican-trucker couture one season, only to replace it with old-man avante-chic the next, outfitting ourselves with fleeting styles made from scorn and irony. We approach new ideas with almost vampirical desperation. But on some level, we've realized that cool cannot be bought. It is an energy that can't be harnessed or co-opted. It's a visceral element, one that depends on its shape-shifting mystique for survival. We've confused style for cool. We've created advertising and marketing wet dreams with our confusion, and they, in turn, have freed us of millions of our dollars spent trying to get it right. Coolness is not, as consumerist culture would have us believe, the one-way ticket to respect and universal love. It is not freedom from public scrutiny and judgement. So what is it? What is this idea that promises us a little piece of heaven at the cost of so much social hell?

I was thinking about it as I walked home from a coffeehouse this morning, a sloshing take-out cup in my hand, a newspaper under my arm, and as I watched the random strangers passing by, it hit me. Coolness is the complete lack, either of posturing or awareness, of 'cool'. There's no such thing. It's been this social boogeyman for as long as I've taken breaths, held me hostage, kept me foolish, and the whole time, it's simply been a fake! Golly, why couldn't I have figured this out sooner? I could have erased so much self-loathing and doubt! Maybe those years really would have been the best of my life. Who knows. And really, who cares. Those years are gone now, and I survived them, with relatively few battle scars. It's taken me 27 years to learn how to walk with my head up. To look people in the eye and feel I have something of value to say. To have the sand to be a little bit different. And it's as close to cool as I've ever felt.