Remember the label “class clown” from elementary or high school? It was usually given to the loud, goofy, slightly outrageous student. Now think about who that student was in your classes. It was probably a boy, right?
This always bothered and perplexed me because, frankly, I’m weird, loud, and slightly outrageous too. I also would like to think I’m funny. But the same traits my peers celebrated in boys were the ones I was ostracized for, bullied for, and quickly taught to feel ashamed of.
For a long time, the shame worked.
Women are often taught, explicitly and implicitly, that there are limits to how much space we are supposed to occupy. Be confident, but not intimidating. Be funny, but not obnoxious. Have opinions, but don’t be argumentative. Be caring, but not too caring. For neurodivergent women especially, those expectations can make masking feel like a requirement. When you are repeatedly told that you are too loud, too intense, too emotional, or simply “too much,” you eventually start believing the solution is to become less.
I moved schools several times when I was growing up because of my learning disabilities, and the double standard between how I acted versus more popular male counterparts always remained. Changing schools so much also meant I was consistently late to the game. By the time I arrived, my classmates had already known each other for years. They already had their cliques, inside jokes, friend traditions, and, for the most part, a place where they belonged. I didn’t.
Throughout elementary school, I moved between groups, trying desperately to find somewhere I could fit. Despite acting up one-fifth as much as my male counterparts, despite being kind to everyone and always trying to make people laugh, I was still the last name added to the birthday party list, the person invited when someone else cancelled, the backup when plans fell through. Some classmates probably genuinely liked me, but I never felt like anyone’s first choice.
After years of this, I stopped seeing friendship as something that simply hadn’t worked out yet. I started seeing it as evidence that there was something seriously wrong with me.
Even as a kid, I lay awake at night replaying the day’s interactions. I obsessed over every joke I made, every awkward moment, every time I thought I had said too much or acted strangely. I picked apart conversations, trying to solve what felt like a mystery: what was it about me that made people keep me at arm’s length?
By middle school, I had internalized years of feeling unwanted so deeply that I no longer knew how I was supposed to act around other people. I was anxious and hyperaware of everything I said and did.
Before starting middle school, I remember deciding, and actually saying out loud, that I was going to “change everything about myself.”
That decision shaped the next several years of my life.
Through middle school and all the way through high school, I became good at creating different versions of myself for different situations. I learned which parts of my personality to exaggerate, which ones to hide, when to stay quiet, when to laugh, and when to make myself smaller. Instead of responding naturally, I constantly filtered my reactions through one question: how will other people receive this?
I thought that if I could find the right version of myself, someone quieter, less intense, less noticeably me, I would finally earn acceptance. Unknowingly, I was conforming to the patriarchal norms and standards forced upon me and all my female peers.
But even though I tried to constrain myself to fit expected norms, the acceptance I was striving for never really came.
The irony is that I was trying desperately to “change myself” before I had ever given myself the opportunity to figure out who I was. I spent so many years separating from my natural instincts and reactions that I became consumed with appearing normal rather than becoming comfortable in my own skin. I had accepted that friendship was something I had to earn by performing correctly, and that belonging depended on making myself easier for other people, especially men, to accept.
Then I started university. For the first time, everyone around me was new to the school, new to the city, and searching for friends. There were no years-old cliques to break into or friendships I had arrived too late to join.
And somehow, after spending most of my childhood searching desperately for a group where I belonged, I found one almost immediately.
I found myself surrounded by seven intelligent, loud, funny, opinionated, and wonderfully outrageous women, who I never had to second guess myself around.
I could speak openly and passionately about the politics and social issues that were important to me. I introduced them to my favourite comedy movies and TV shows. I was able to voice any stupid joke or comment that came to my mind. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t censoring myself for others; I didn’t have to make myself smaller in order to be accepted. I was just myself, and they liked me regardless. That realization changed much more than how I behaved around those seven people.
My new confidence began following me outside these friendships. I stopped feeling embarrassed about raising my hand in class, I became less hesitant to express how deeply I cared about politics, I stopped swallowing jokes because I worried someone might think they were stupid. Slowly, the question that had governed so much of my life, notably the question of what will others think of me, became less important.
My friendships at university have taught me that the answer was never to become a duller human. If anything, these women have encouraged me to take up more space, to speak louder about the things I care about, trust my own personality, and stop apologizing for parts of myself that make other people uncomfortable simply because I refuse to fit neatly into their expectations.
We have empowered each other to be loud, ambitious, emotional, opinionated, ridiculous, passionate, and entirely ourselves. And, especially in spaces such as politics and the classroom where women are still expected to make themselves smaller to accommodate the men around them, that kind of friendship has felt radical in its own way.
Now, as we move through our fourth and final year at Queen’s and prepare for the possibility that graduation will scatter us across different cities and provinces, I find myself thinking about what I will carry with me when we leave.
Of course, I will carry the friendships themselves. But I will also carry the person those friendships helped me become.
The younger version of me believed there had to be something wrong with her because she could never seem to find a place where she completely belonged. The teenager I became thought the solution was to keep changing until she became someone other people would choose.
I wish I could tell both of them that they were asking the wrong question.
I did not need to figure out how to make everyone like me. I needed to find the people who gave me enough room to figure out who I was.
So, yes, I’m loud, I’m emotional, I’m weird. I obsess over comedy and politics like my life depends on it. I make stupid jokes, I care too deeply about things, and I will always be outrageous.
And that’s okay.
I don’t need everyone to like me, and I don’t need to be friends with everybody. I know now that there will always be space for me, not because everyone will choose to make that space, but because I will never again make myself smaller just to fit inside the space someone else thinks I deserve.
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Steve
True enough and we’ll written: so much depends upon finding the right people, or not. I don’t think it a gendered thing, but it has been a Queens thing for 185 years.