I’m not sure I could teach you how to be popular, even if I wanted to. I never felt like I was when I was growing up, so it might be a bit like asking our dog Stella to teach you to drive a stick shift. Truthfully, I’d rather teach you how to make friends and be a good friend to others. I think that will serve you better.
Besides that, talking about popularity and social status gives me a case of imposter syndrome, as if all the people I consider friends are suddenly going to reveal they’ve been trolling me for years and actually think I’m a total tool.
So, I’d rather teach you the resilience and self-confidence you need to be less concerned about popularity and social status and more focused on finding connections that make you happy.
Why do I say I wasn’t popular? In elementary and middle school, I was a fat kid who liked to read and didn’t have a ton of friends, so I got picked on. I don’t say that to elicit pity, my experience wasn’t unique or particularly awful; kids can be real assholes. And since this is intended for you to read when you’re 18, by the time you read it, you’ll have had your own experiences to judge that statement. But my life experiences have taught me something valuable; you can make friends, be a good friend, and have a great social life without being focused on how popular you are.
An aside about shitty kids: while I was thinking about this entry, I looked up a guy on Facebook who once pissed in my canteen at Boy Scout camp. I was surprised to see he’d grown up to be a chef and opened a food truck that focused on natural and local foods. I told your Mom how surprised I was that we shared an interest, that as adults we’d have something to talk about besides what a canteen that had been pissed in tasted like. I’m not sure what I expected, maybe that he’d gone into professional watersports, but she said something I had to share: “Hopefully we can all grow and change.” And who knows if he did, but she’s right. It’s important to allow for that possibility.
Back on topic. My intent isn’t to focus on exclusionary popularity and how social status can be built on being shitty to less popular people. No matter how you do it, I don’t think that striving for popularity and social status will make you happy or improve your life, so I’m not about to tell you you should do either one.
You know what will improve your life? Being resilient, believing in yourself and your own worth, and not getting bent out of shape about what other people think about you. That kind of self-confidence frees you to be yourself, instead of some version of yourself you think other people will like. And the resilience? It’s for when you’re not feeling so good about yourself.
I realize I’m underselling how difficult it is to be self-confident and resilient. I wish it were as easy as teaching you to ride a bike or throw a ball. Stand here, do this, and suddenly, you’re doing it. Clearly, it’s not. But just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Glennon Doyle said it well, “we can do hard things.”
I have a friend from college who has more “best friends” than most people have acquaintances. And as much as we tease him for making best friends with seven people before breakfast every day, Randy is probably one of the kindest people I know. I hope you’ve had the chance to spend time with him, his son, and his wife as you’ve grown up, but the relevant story about him comes from our days at Wake Forest. When I was in school, an incredibly high percentage of students belonged to a fraternity or sorority. Much of your social status had to do with the organization you’d joined.
While some people avoided socializing outside their fraternity or sorority, Randy didn’t limit himself to our group. As I’m writing this, I can’t believe how juvenile and insane it sounds to call him courageous for eating meals with people who weren’t in our secret handshake club. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Despite older fraternity brothers telling him he shouldn’t, Randy sat in the cafeteria and ate with people those fraternity members didn’t think were cool.
It feels like a little thing now, looking back twenty years later. But as someone who worried about my own social status when I was in college, I’m not sure I could have done what he did. I know I didn’t.
See, it takes self-confidence and resilience to act that way, to be above that kind of pettiness. When you learn to care a little less about what others think, you’re free to make connections that work for you, to be friends with the kinds of people you want to be friends with.
And you be a good friend to those people by sitting with them in the cafeteria when other people don’t think you should. What other people think matters less because they’re you’re friends.
In Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, she talks about these kinds of friends, calling them “marble jar friends.” Here’s an bit from a speech she gave at UCLA in 2015 where she explains the idea:
“One day, my daughter, Ellen, came home from school. She was in third grade. And the minute we closed the front door, she literally just started sobbing and slid down the door until she was just kind of a heap of crying on the floor. And of course I was … It scared me, and I said, “What's wrong Ellen? What happened? What happened?”
And she pulled herself together enough to say, “Something really hard happened to me today at school, and I shared it with a couple of my friends during recess. And by the time we got back into the classroom, everyone in my class knew what had happened, and they were laughing and pointing at me and calling me names.” And it was so bad, and the kids were being so disruptive, that her teacher even had to take marbles out of this marble jar.
And the marble jar in the classroom is a jar where if the kids are making great choices together, the teacher adds marbles. If they're making not great choices, the teacher takes out marbles. And if the jar gets filled up, there's a celebration for the class.
And so, she said, “It was one of the worst moments in my life. They were laughing and pointing. And Miss Bacchum, my teacher, kept saying, ‘I'm going to take marbles out.' And she didn't know what was happening.”
And she looked at me just with this face that is just seared my mind and said, “I will never trust anyone again.” And my first reaction, to be really honest with you, was, “Damn straight, you don't tell anybody anything but your Mama.”
Yeah, right? That's it. I mean, that was my … “You just tell me. And when you grow up and you go off to school, Mama will go too. I'll get a little apartment.” And the other thing I was thinking to be quite honest with you is, “I will find out who those kids were.” And while I'm not going to beat up a nine year old, I know their mamas.
You know, that's the place you go to. And I'm like, “How am I going to explain trust to this third grader in front of me?” So I took a deep breath and I said, “Ellen, trust is like a marble jar.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You share those hard stories and those hard things that are happening to you with friends, who, over time, you filled up their marble jar. They've done thing after thing after thing where you're like, ‘I know I can share this with this person.' Does that make sense?”
Yes!
And that's what Ellen said, “Yes, that makes sense.” And I said, “Do you have any marble jar friends?” And she said, “Oh yeah. Totally. Hannah and Lorna are marble jar friends.” And I said … And then this is where things got interesting. I said, “Tell me what you mean. How do they earn marbles for you?”
And she's like, “Well, Lorna, if there's not a seat for me at the lunch cafeteria, she'll scoot over and give me half a heinie seat.” And I'm like, “She will?” She's like, “Yeah. She'll just sit like that, and so I can sit with her.” And I said, “That's a big deal.” This is not what I was expecting to hear.
And then she said, “And you know Hannah, on Sunday at my soccer game?” And I was waiting for this story where she said, “I got hit by a ball and I was laying on the field, and Hannah picked me up and ran me to first aid.” And I was like, “Yeah?” And she said, “Hannah looked over and she saw Oma and Opa,” my parents, her grandparents, “And she said, ‘Look, your Oma and Opa are here.'” And I was like …
And I was like, “Boy, she got a marble for that?” And she goes, “Well, you know, not all my friends have eight grandparents.” Because my parents are divorced and remarried, my husband's parents were divorced and remarried. And she said, “And it was so nice to me that she remembered their names.”
And I was like, “Hmm.” And she said, “Do you have marble jar friends?” And I said, “Yeah, I do have a couple of marble jar friends.” And she said, “Well, what kind of things do they do to get marbles?” And this feeling came over me. And I thought … The first thing I could think of, because we were talking about the soccer game, was that same game. My good friend Eileen walked up to my parents and said, “Diane, David, good to see you.” And I remember what that felt like for me. And I was like, certainly, trust cannot be built by these small insignificant moments in our lives. It's gotta be a grander gesture than that.
So, as a researcher, I start looking into the data. I gather up the doctoral students who've worked with me. We start looking. And it is crystal clear. Trust is built in very small moments. And when we started looking at examples of when people talked about trust in the research, they said things like, “Yeah, I really trust my boss. She even asked me how my mom's chemotherapy was going.” “I trust my neighbor because if something's going on with my kid, it doesn't matter what she's doing, she'll come over and help me figure it out.” You know, one of the number one things emerged around trust and small things? People who attend funerals. “This is someone who showed up at my sister's funeral.”
For more on why attending funerals matters, how to act and why to do, see my post on How to deal: Grief, Loss, and Funerals.
But these marble jar friends are the kinds of people you should be make friends with and stay friends with. And this is the kind of friend you should be. Because when you need to trust someone, you’ll be able to trust them. And when they need to trust someone, they’ll be able to trust you.
When you have those kinds of friends to depend on and spend time with, you’ll find yourself caring less about who’s cool and who’s not and more about the friends you know you can depend on. Which is a pretty great way to go through life.
I love you and hope you find your marble jar friends,
Dad
I originally planned to finish this series in twelve months, intending to write one entry a week for 52 weeks. But, other things came up and I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would. We moved, you started a new school, I had other projects, etc. But finally, I’m starting my last entry in September, nine months after I’d planned. Which is the perfect intro to this one.
Time is funny like that. It marches on like a metronome, indifferent to how much you wish it would slow down or speed up. It offers no do-overs, no matter how frivolously you spend it. And it gives zero fucks what you planned to accomplish in the time you had. Once that time is over, you’ll get no more. But, it also stretches out ahead of you into an unknown future, offering untold possibility and infinite choices.
Which is why I hope you both learn to make choices about how you spend your time and understand what those choices mean. Because while there’s never enough time for everything, there’s still enough time to do almost anything.