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Groupness
Posted on 2008.01.29 at 07:41
On the way home from Spamalot the other night, a grad school friend and I somehow got on the subject of SCA* and our feelings about it (the group makes me mildly uncomfortable). I found myself dancing around the subject, since I'd like to think I'm the last person to condemn a (sub)culture or way of living. It's not what the group or its members do per se--throwing swords around and play acting sounds fun (although carrying an entire character in an elaborate fantasy life is not for me). It's not the sexual side of the group--polyamory seems as good a way to do it as any. It may partly be that the members seem to cultivate a particular interpersonal style that I've actively avoided adopting--despite (or because of) my inherent geekiness, my leanings towards nerdiness, and--let's be honest--my fear of ultimate dorkdom. Brashly embracing the thing I was taught to fear? That's part of it, surely. But there's something else.
I'm lying in bed this morning in random thought zone, and I come to the realization that, above anything else, it's the groupness of it that I don't connect with. It's the same thing I find creepy about improv troupes, the cool kids, cults, and the Junior League. I was never really part of a clique, never a member of a religious group, and never had a single identity in high school (jock, nerd, theatre kid--I was all of the above)--to my constant misery as a kid. I realize that today I'm a member of several social, political, and professional groups, but none of them wholly define me, and I have friends and acquaintances from many parts of my life. I'm such a solitary person, and as an adult I like being the hub to many social spokes, even if that means not being a part of something. The idea of having a single group take over so much of my social, recreational, sexual, and fantasy life makes me nervous. And yet, when I come close to groups like that, I always feel a familiar sense of exclusion, just as the people within them feel inclusion. That's just as it should be--it wouldn't be a group otherwise--but it just makes me uncomfortable.
*Society for Creative Anachronism. If you don't know, just Google it.
I'm lying in bed this morning in random thought zone, and I come to the realization that, above anything else, it's the groupness of it that I don't connect with. It's the same thing I find creepy about improv troupes, the cool kids, cults, and the Junior League. I was never really part of a clique, never a member of a religious group, and never had a single identity in high school (jock, nerd, theatre kid--I was all of the above)--to my constant misery as a kid. I realize that today I'm a member of several social, political, and professional groups, but none of them wholly define me, and I have friends and acquaintances from many parts of my life. I'm such a solitary person, and as an adult I like being the hub to many social spokes, even if that means not being a part of something. The idea of having a single group take over so much of my social, recreational, sexual, and fantasy life makes me nervous. And yet, when I come close to groups like that, I always feel a familiar sense of exclusion, just as the people within them feel inclusion. That's just as it should be--it wouldn't be a group otherwise--but it just makes me uncomfortable.
*Society for Creative Anachronism. If you don't know, just Google it.