People in Buckets

For a lot of us, when we think back to high school we think of roles. We think of nerds and jocks and cheerleaders and artists and the kinds of kids who wore Marilyn Manson t-shirts, and the do-gooders from Amnesty International. The particulars may vary based on generations and specific schools, but the simplifications loom. Maybe it’s the impact of movies like The Breakfast Club that so aggressively put high school archetypes at the fore. Maybe it’s our developmental stage—the need to categorize a blooming catalog of people in our lives, balanced by the need for a sense of our own tribe and where we fit in and how we belong.

People tend to be more complex than these roles or cliques would suggest. I give you, for example, my core group of high school buddies. We’d most easily be categorized as nerds, yet there are variations. For though I participated in Mathletics, edited the school newspaper, and maintained an A average, I was middle of this particular pack when it came to grades, and particularly middling in math and science. I was a nerd of nuance, too, in my concurrent budding obsessions with creative writing, professional wrestling, NBA basketball, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While I like to think myself special and particularly interesting, there were further shades within the group, from my friend who was most musically oriented, and the one who was a soccer standout, and the one who was better than the rest of us at basketball and had a girlfriend first. The one who wasn’t so bright but somehow or other fell in with us, so I let him copy my worksheets and quizzes in Health class. The one who stood out as the smartest of the smart—a legit borderline genius whose trains of thoughts I chased in an attempt to keep up, and who I leaned on to do all of the work as my chemistry lab partner.

I recall taking a personality test our senior year. It included listing animals that you most closely associate with. I recall picking a penguin, because they’re awkward and fall down a lot, and that my friends readily laughed along with that. I picked a wolf, too, under the rationale that they can be loners, and focused on the hunt—thinking of all the times I felt on my own as a teenager, and particularly my relentless pursuit of drafting novels at the time. My friends were less sure of that one. That smartest asked, “You know no one sees you that way, right?”

I’m sure he was right, but clearly the comment stuck in my craw enough to recall it over fifteen years later.

Of course, as I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed a breakdown of easy categories in my own world. That the Star Wars obsessees I hung out with in Baltimore also watched football every Sunday in the fall, and that my wife keeps crystals and meditates, but also has a soft spot for Sex & the City. Heck, I read literary fiction between sets at the gym and write prose poems about Hulk Hogan.

Some of this diversification of interests has to do with evolution and assimilation—that we learn and change and that we inevitably pick things up along the way. Some of it has to do with the complexity of humans to begin with. In high school there are smart jocks and sporty nerds; cheerleaders who are participating in a sport less out of school spirit than to improve their shot at earning college scholarships.

So, too, can it be said that not everyone who voted for Donald Trump for president was racist, nor was everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton oblivious to her shortcomings. I’m spinning out pretty broadly here with this simple takeaway that I’ve learned and had to relearn so many times in my adult life. We put people in buckets not so much on account of their choices or characteristics, but rather for our own convenience. I don’t know that I’ve met anyone who feels completely comfortable identified as a type. We categorize people for our own comfort, usually to be proven wrong when we look closely enough.