At fourteen, leaning into the start of my sophomore year at South Lake Tahoe High School, my skater-stoner crew proudly stood apart from the jocks, their sycophantic cheerleaders, the rich kids, and the prep-nerds. Aside from attending the same school, our tribes had nothing in common with each other, though they fiendishly worked to bend that truth into a viable workaround. Each group declared their separate territories in the early mornings, and then postured with faux identity courage during the ever-important lunch time, in desperate shows of popular solidarity, hoping privately to velcro themselves to the affirmations of others within groups they couldn’t belong to. The ego-thirst of adolescence, born of low self-esteem, is a wretched slow-acting poison that indicts us all through the rearview mirror.
Expediency glued these social factions together. Insecure pretty girls with daddy issues, whose bodies bloomed early, would cling to big-fish small-pond athletes who would never play pro ball, but were “Gods” in the quad, in hopes of defending their spot on the cheer squad against the less-attractive, but more athletic gymnast girls who would bravely challenge them for a spot, only to claim a flag corps spot. Merit is a slave to whimsy. The closest a brainiac might get to a pretty girl moonwalking through the upper crust, depended upon which athlete’s homework he agreed to furnish, while the rich kids threw the parties. Transactionalism ruled the day. Popular kids get acquainted with hierarchy, manipulation, and the exploitive hallmarks of capitalism early, while those most likely to succeed, trade on their skills to acquire the social currency they are fooled into believing they need.
All of it happens at all, because everyone at that age is hollow, vapid, and devoid of any foundational self-awareness rooted in principals or universals that can compete with those early doses of dopamine.
My stoner circle of skaters, all weirdo-misfits, was avoided like a leper colony on campus, until of course, somebody needed the weed growing like forests in our foothill back yards. Sooner or later, everybody came hunting for party favors; the lower parking lot’s smoke cloud signaled a no-go zone, years before those were a thing in Europe, and formed a come-get-it gauntlet those who looked down upon us had to walk through in order to access the things they despised about us. We charged them for perpetrating the irony that would have them side-eye us in the hall, but need us to make their parties go. They couldn’t just hang out, bump music, and vibe – they needed chemicals to alter their realities and lubricate their jagged social puzzle pieces.
We couldn’t blow tree on campus in the open, so necessity drove us to the overflow lots, beyond the view of school cops and snitches. But being self-separated nurtured a social skill most don’t practice until they leave high school, one that cleaves the pressure of fitting in, shrinks the pool of onlookers judging one’s difference, and builds solidarity rooted in those differences. I actually learned to not need social strokes from others, by opting to not stand in shared spaces with groups of social judges. That distance allowed me to not be on display to others, but rather, be in circle with folks who organically felt othered already. Because there was a solidarity born of rejection that glued us together from the start, I never felt casted out from anything I didn’t already have, or from folks who already connected with me.
Prison is a lot like high school. Gangs thrive behind the wall, for the very reasons insecure teens contort themselves to fit into the trend-boxes shaped by those whose opinions they voluntarily elevate over their own, out of insecure fear. Leaning into social rebellion early on in high school, taught me to resist the whispers that now urge me to join a prison gangs.
I am dopamine.
