Surviving the high school years
High school was not a happy time for me. I was painfully shy and it always felt like I was outside looking in. I knew that I would love college, but I also knew that I had to finish high school as quickly as possible. To that end, I went to school every semester, summer, winter, spring, and fall, with no breaks in between.
It was during this time that I became aware of Go-Getters, a service organization that seeks to promote school and community spirit in support of competitive interscholastic activities. In theory, anyone could join. I say theoretically because the only ones who passed the interview process were the popular girls. It wasn’t one of them.
The old saying, “birds of the same plumage fly together” was absolutely true during those years. He didn’t have close friends, but he did have a few fellow students, as well as three other girls who weren’t popular and didn’t fit in.
Needless to say, if you weren’t popular and didn’t fit in, you weren’t invited to parties either.
As a deeply introvert, I didn’t mind that I wasn’t invited to parties, but I did mind not getting into the Go-Getters because I wanted to make a difference. I did not know that its purpose was to promote sporting events; I just thought they were promoting our school and our community.
One day, I called my three friends, the other girls who were as unpopular as me, and told them my idea.
I decided that the four of us should form our own club, a secret club, and that no one would be allowed to know that our total membership was four girls.
In response to the Go-Getters, a club that rejected my membership, I decided that our club would be called We-Gottems. The Go-Getters had black satin jackets with Go-Getters stamped on the back of their jackets and the member’s name on the front and I decided our We-Gottems would do the same for our jackets.
I remember taking one of my jackets and embroidering We-Gottems on the back and my name on the front pocket. The other girls did the same with their jackets. And we wear our jackets to school and we didn’t answer questions about our club. When someone asked, we said that our membership was secret.
One day, I decided that we had to do something a little more adventurous, so I told my friends that we should have a party and invite some popular Go-Getters and some popular boys and tell the guys the names of the popular girls that We were going to be there and tell the girls the names of the popular boys who had accepted our invitation.
Surprisingly, it worked. My three friends and I weren’t any more popular than before, but at least we weren’t outside looking inward anymore. We were at this party with the popular people.
When someone asked us where our other members were, we told them they had other commitments. Nobody asked us the tough questions about our club; they were just happy to be invited to a party where other popular students were invited.
They probably would have ignored me if it weren’t for the party being held at my house. We had a gramophone and I was busy rolling the knob and changing 78rpm vinyl records to dance, so at least it had something to do with my time.
After seeing the success of that party, I asked my friends how they felt about having more parties, using the same strategy. They agreed with my idea and every few weeks we had another party.
We invited different Go-Getters to each party and different popular kids who had not been invited to the other parties. That way, no one could guess that these parts were in the hands of the same four girls and that we had no one else in our club. The girls and boys looked forward to being invited to our parties because the popular students were always there.
I was always coming up with new ideas to make We-Gottems visible without revealing our secret membership. The only thing I noticed was that nobody cared as long as they were considered popular enough to be included.
It was a great learning experience for me. Imagine that !! Popular students were concerned that other students would think they were popular enough to be included. Whodathunkit?
I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen, my senior year, but the other boys and girls were old enough to date, so there weren’t enough students to invite to our parties anymore. The club had served our purpose, so we disbanded it and began concentrating on our college entrance exams.
Unfortunately, life’s best lessons are often revealed to us many years after we experience them. The same goes for the lessons I learned from those high school years. It took me many years to realize that I was creative enough to make lemonade out of lemons and that no matter the circumstances, I would always find a way to survive. It is a lesson that has served me well.