Classy

So I've been feeling painfully alienated lately, which probably spurred my "dating" posts. I mentioned to my committee chair today that although I'm in a PhD program, I'm never going to "fit in" to the class of people I now associate with. I thought back to the unbearable levels of awkwardness that were cocktail parties in the Fellows' Garden at Oxford, and the parties were awkward not just because I was holding a glass of orange juice. It's such an upper-class name drop, is Oxford. It's nearly a joke. I'm a fish out of water. Financially and educationally, my family are not upper-middle class. We're solidly upper-lower-class, which puts us just North of minimum-wage-slavery. And yet culturally, we don't fit that, either. Grandmother made sure we learned how to eat with the fork, tines down, in our left hands. She gave advice about ladylike fingernail polish (which I have since tossed out completely). She even, accidentally, gave us her recipe for the perfect dirty martini.

Remember that we don't drink martinis: We're Mormon.

But as I was discussing it, realizing how trite the whole conversation must be to my professor and we moved on to popular culture, it suddenly all connected in my head to imposter syndrome. Alienation isn't just a matter of class, it's something that happens inside your head when you anticipate intolerance. It's the wince before the blow falls. And wincing only comes after lots of blows have fallen. It's the flinch of someone who knows that this is going to hurt. Alienation is fear, not of being alone, but of being reminded that we have always been alone, and that we deserve it.

We don't want to actually belong - nobody I know wants to be entirely subsumed in a stereotype - we want to feel part of something. We want to speak like a native, as if we've always belonged, not just as if we're fluent through extensive study or even immersion. When it comes to class, we can't change where we are from, and the more upwardly mobile we attempt to be, the more we feel like we're fake - not native. We're out of our element. My professor pointed out, though, that we feel alienation when we move up. Moving down isn't as big an issue. How many of us feel really awkward and self-conscious ordering a meal at McDonalds? Or getting an evening job as a stocker, dishwasher, or janitor? As long as we don't pretend we're better than the people around us, they don't retaliate in the same way that wealthy people will stare at the dress you bought at Target.

So arrange all your peer groups in a circle around you. Americans, academics, geeks, Mormons, gamers, musicians, rubensian beach bums, librarians, readers, fans, shippers, singles, middle-aged, reptile fanciers, computer techs, stage techs, anglophiles, [insert political affiliation here]: and divide them, fake from the real. When did you learn that language? Why?

What was your first language? No, before that one. Nope, further back. . .

That one. I know that language too. So does everybody you will ever meet. The only way to dispell the pain of alienation is to speak that language, and to hear it spoken. It's the only language in which pronouns neither reject nor subsume, and in which we remain simultaneously distinct and unified. It's not mysticism. It's rhetoric on a cosmic scale.