Embracing your uniqueness is popular these days, so much so that it’s become a staple story in the media. But there’s an irony to this that many miss. I went to a high school that celebrated uniqueness. With their philosophy of embracing your own path, it seemed a perfect place for students experiencing positive maladjustment to an unhealthy society to live a healthy, authentic life.
And in that school, I felt estranged and disintegrated from all this maladjustment.
When Authenticity is Inauthentic
“Be yourself!” “Follow your own path!” “Learn at your own pace!”
These were the ideals my school promoted. They look like a utopia on paper. How could anyone possibly become maladjusted against these virtues?
But there was a flip side to each of them.
“Be yourself” became pressure to create a brand that fit the “unique” mold.
“Follow your own path” led students away from any pressure to learn and improve.
“Learn at your own pace” meant nobody learned any sense of hard work and accountability.
Teachers called us geniuses when they should have instead helped us understand our limitations. When a student began to get stressed, the school’s response was to hold back anything that he or she might perceive as a criticism. Allowing students to learn at their own paces has something to be said for it, but the school forgot the key word: learning.
Maladjustment had become its own norm, and we were expected to adjust to it. Our teachers frowned upon the following of any convention; judgment and social rules were taboo. Students and staff alike pushed a social code on the big social justice subjects. What had once been a rebellion for freedom now became an insistence that this narrow form of maladjustment was itself the path to freedom. If anyone did feel out of place, there was an easy place to pin the blame: Society, with a capital S.
Maladjustment had become its own norm, and we were expected to adjust to it.
Why are we learning about activism and not academics? Well, Society makes us all ignorant.
Why is the club only for women? Well, Society makes it so they need a safe space from men.
Maybe this worked for the other students. After all, my typical classmates were highly emotional artists. They dressed in ripped hoodies with dyed hair of countless colors, and were unafraid of shouting their crises to the entire population. To be seen as “real,” as authentic, they needed to have anxiety attacks, gender-related angst, and a fandom of niche media. In my average clothes, with natural hair and little to say on antidepressant recommendations or the latest movie’s political incorrectness, I wasn’t cool.
I wasn’t particularly fond of the other students, either. I saw them as frustratingly sensitive, and their fashion was an obvious statement of their refusal to follow any standard. This made group meet-ups a nightmare to manage, though I did try.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself
At the same time that the staff worked to create this utopia for the maladjusted within the halls of the school, they prepared us for what they were sure was a positive maladjustment to the dystopian world outside.
The fight against injustice was the top priority in our curriculum—certainly above learning to think for ourselves. I still vividly recall the time my history teacher shared the president’s State of the Union Address. She asked us to take notes on what we thought about it. She even said, “You shouldn’t be writing down anything based on what your peers will think,” seemingly encouraging us to think for ourselves.
But then, every few sentences, she would interrupt to explain what the president’s words had really meant. She presented her opinions as if they were facts. What was missing from this shining example was any critical discussion of a policy or its cultural and historical implications. We were never taught how to pick apart bias and interpret these statements; we were only taught what to think. Any question against the school’s worldview was shut down.
Over the course of my time there, students founded only a single consistently-running lunch club for leisure; all the other clubs were discussion groups around race, gender, and social perspectives. This leisure lunch club was needlessly limited to women out of concern that having men present would make us “feel unsafe.” I recognize that some women may have awful experiences at the hands of men, but that doesn’t make it constructive to treat all girls and women as if they have this pain, nor is it constructive to prevent innocent men from enjoying school life for the sake of one particular group’s trauma.
The issues of injustice that we focused on are real and important, but young people should have a chance to enjoy childhood without worrying about politics. As it was, only fear itself—the fear they taught us—stopped most of us from enjoying our lives. I was shocked when I met students from other schools who weren’t talking serious social issues 24/7.
Lost in Pseudo-Authenticity
In this school that was so dedicated to helping me embrace myself, I felt utterly neglected. This culture of self-celebration made it difficult for students to have honest conversations. Peers would expect me to follow their lead, instantly jumping into complaining about the “tough stuff” without really asking anything to get to know me. Connections between students unfolded against the backdrop of this philosophy, which expected us all to be eagerly climbing into the box of what “unique” looked like. Anyone who thought otherwise was seen as tragically conditioned.
In a community where the norm for friendship was constant compliments and sweetness, students accused any boy who preferred teasing and banter of toxic masculinity. As a woman who desired the latter type of friendship, however, I knew it was sometimes a matter of difference in personality. I myself was expected to feel offended by words like “mankind,” but instead saw it was shorthand for “human” and barely cared about one word in a conversation. Mentors assumed I felt insecure and hated my body because of things like make-up commercials, but I found that assumption humiliating. I wasn’t that fragile, and calling me “beautiful” all of the time seemed weird and unrealistic. I mean, I don’t think every person I see is a 10/10 model, so why should everyone think that of me? All of the aggressive “female empowerment” messages I got placed an uncomfortable amount of attention on my sex, which I saw as an almost entirely irrelevant trait. Accepting myself didn’t require me to dominate the world.
The Search for Truly Authentic Values
In his theory of positive disintegration, Kazimierz Dabrowski asserted that one’s true values are those an individual comes to on his or her own terms. These values may stem from a person’s innate temperament and personal experiences, but she uses a third factor—her internal will to develop into her best self—to determine what she wants as an individual. The environment, that second factor, plays a role, but it should not be the deciding factor: the individual must determine for herself which path is higher and which path is lower.
Even though they paid lip service to being maladjusted to a sick society, they ended up creating an alternative society that had its own sickness, and that just as enthusiastically discouraged the third factor in favor of the second.
My high school insisted that truly independent values could only be the opposite of societal norms. They created an environment that pushed their own set of values. In doing so, they eliminated a core feature of independent values: the fact that all would grow and discover them independently. In other words, even though they paid lip service to being maladjusted to a sick society, they ended up creating an alternative society that had its own sickness, and that just as enthusiastically discouraged the third factor in favor of the second.
Life in the Sick Society
I witnessed the stress that this environment caused students. Many students seemed to force themselves to be morally perfect—or at least, what the school said was morally perfect. This led us to walk on eggshells, and emotions were so tense you could feel it. There was a forced politeness, a disclaimer like, “Of course it’s amazing, it helps many people…” or “Of course anyone can do this, and be who they are, there’s no one way…” padding every situation, preventing any honesty.
Meanwhile, students could become quite brutal if upset. I saw classmates aggressively call out others for things as simple as disliking a music artist who donated to charity. They showed no forgiveness. You always “should have known better by now,” and were never allowed to disagree or be forgiven for your mistakes.
As for me, I believed that I would one day be the “self” they taught me to be and understand their values if I just pushed myself into submission hard enough. I felt like I needed to find this idea of “myself” to be happy—that quirky, emotional, suppressed part of myself I had to awaken.
I held back majority of my true thoughts and tried my hardest to do what they wanted, sometimes researching the “right” thing to an unhealthy extent. I tried to free my true self by diving far deeper than I wanted to into anything that interested me, going to school or get-togethers in cosplay, buying way too many anime posters, and ultimately becoming lost in a sort of “egotistical materialism.” Looking at novellas I wrote at the time, my very diverse characters strike me. One might see this as an act of the heroic writer, but really, it’s the result of years of people-pleasing.
For as hard as I tried to free my true self, something in me always seemed to resist. At first, I thought it was a broken part of me that couldn’t accept my proper personality like everyone else was able to. I later came to realize this was a result of what Dabrowski called dynamisms—the psychological processes of positive disintegration and reintegration, through which we truly become our authentic, higher selves.
I didn’t recognize that I was suppressing my true personality because I’d never thought it was possible for it to be a personality type. There was a way I felt different from my peers that I could never articulate, one that isn’t really written about. I didn’t feel isolated for being divergent, but from the divergent community.
The Turning Point
Then I discovered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. That made everything click.
I first took the test while deep in the trenches of peer pressure. After leaving high school and its expectations, I took it again. I got two distinct results—two personalities that corresponded to “what is” and “what ought to be,” to use Dabrowski’s language.
The first time I took the test, I answered based on what I felt compelled to do rather than what I really wanted. The results were INFJ, fittingly called the Advocate. The description was the perfect image of the “self” my school wanted me to be: a social activist concerned with humanity’s problems, with a charitable instinct to save the world. At the time, I fervently aspired to be involved in charity work—or at least, I thought I did out of a sense of guilt.
This, I believe, was the part of me that embodied that lower sense of “what is”: the way I acted at the time, or felt that I needed to act, influenced by a negative adjustment to second factor pressures.
The second test gave the result of ESTJ, the Executive, a near opposite personality type. As soon as I saw this, I had the reaction so many outsiders feel in self-discovery: “That’s me!”
I fit the ESTJ profile perfectly: a leader with a good sense of organization whose biggest pet peeve is “follow your heart!” This type is associated with executive positions and upholding community standards. I jokingly called it “the Society type.” To my school, this personality could only exist as a result of conditioning, or as an easy place to pin the blame for problems hurting “real human beings.”
This was the start of my own positive disintegration. It unfolded slowly as I started to do more of what I sincerely thought was right and less of what I was taught would be the key to happiness.
When I took that test, I realized it was my personality ideal—my authentic version of “what ought to be.”
This was the start of my own positive disintegration. It unfolded slowly as I started to do more of what I sincerely thought was right and less of what I was taught would be the key to happiness.
I recall a sort of “chrysalis moment” where I really started to move in my own direction. Previously, I had been convinced to only explore “nerd” gatherings, like gaming conventions and artist groups, to find friends. I attended an anime convention hoping to make connections. The image stays in my mind of myself, dressed fully in cosplay as a half-tiger Fire Emblem character, fantasy uniform and white wig and all, glaring down at the vendors with their dyed hair, surrounded by anime merch.
For me, coming out of my shell was in coming home, ripping off that wig, and deciding I wasn’t interested in that sort of convention anymore. Shortly after, I took half the posters off of my wall—not out of shame, but out of finally removing all that I didn’t enjoy. In studying Dabrowski, I learned to accept my own values without guilt over the fact that they were different from what I was taught. I realized my peers were in both types of negative development: negative adjustment and negative maladjustment.
The pressure of our environment led many to negatively adjust—that is, to conform. These people toed the line on values that they didn’t truly hold, often failing to do the good they might have done if they held those values authentically. But the majority of those pushing the values were negatively maladjusted. They projected confidence to hide their insecurity, as they were unable to simply exist as themselves without constantly reminding themselves—and others—how strong they were. This led to shutting out others who disagreed, and refusing to do even small things to respect communities with different norms and values to theirs.
What I saw of their behavior goes against the noble image these negatively maladjusted people had of themselves: that is, perfectly cool people who never did anything wrong, and who had no need to grow, improve, and take responsibility. The community promoted an inherent “truth” that, in my experience, was not true at all. Dabrowski’s idea of a truly authentic, autonomous hierarchy of values helped me accept this. It also helped undo the pressure I felt of needing to be morally perfect. I used to feel that if I argued against their values, I had to do things in a vastly more civil, scholarly manner, maybe to balance the guilt I felt over deviating from their norms.
They projected confidence to hide their insecurity, as they were unable to simply exist as themselves without constantly reminding themselves—and others—how strong they were. This led to shutting out others who disagreed, and refusing to do even small things to respect communities with different norms and values to theirs.
But all people can have feelings, and sometimes they disagree. Life requires a balance: a balance between being kind to others and standing up for who we are ourselves. It requires us to reject extremes like refusing to speak to anyone who disagrees with us while also allowing ourselves to seek communities where we fit, accepting the fact that there are those where we don’t. There will always be things that frustrate us and people we don’t like. It’s less about having an impressively noble set of values and more about living up to your own instead of fighting others. There will be those we avoid, those who are acquaintances, and those who are in our inner circle. If we don’t allow this layered difference, we refuse to be who we really are and become the unthinking, normative followers my high school community tried to discourage us from being.
Identifying Values
After realizing this, my next step was finding what my values actually were. Other authors on Third Factor had written lists of their core values in their articles about community. I made a list of my own.
As it turned out, the values I identified were all values we might associate with a primarily integrated society, accepted at face value and without any exploration of why they were solid values. The difference was that I now appreciated the reasons behind them, having seen what it looked like when they were absent.
Hard work is important because slacking off causes all things to fall apart. I see critique and correction as a gift, to help me improve and get a sense of where my limits lie. I set rules, deadlines, or structures for my own projects because my school’s policies showed me what happened when they weren’t put in place. We need deadlines to keep a reasonable pace, and some level of rules or structure are necessary for people to organize.
While I have a strong adjustment to the surrounding society, I consider it a positive adjustment. I’ve searched enough to know this is who I am, and where the purpose is behind it.
Responsibility for our behavior is also important. I’ve observed the impact of people’s behavior on others, as well as peers getting a “free pass” to act up by calling themselves “different.” We all have work to pitch in, and we have to be sure to properly help each other, or inform others of the promises we can’t keep.
Finally, my biggest value was active and extraverted communication. My introverted friends would text and call so little that no one ever took the initiative to reach out to me. I wanted friends who would be friends. I wanted to collaborate with people who would actually complete things—who set goals and took them seriously.
The above values seemed evil to my high school community, and for a while I called myself “evil,” too. Now, I realize this was a form of positive maladjustment. I allow myself to have my own ideas of what is higher and lower in life, and feel all right in calling myself “good.” While I have a strong adjustment to the surrounding society, I consider it a positive adjustment. I’ve searched enough to know this is who I am, and where the purpose is behind it.
After spending the majority of my years struggling to find the beat of my own drum, and never hearing it, I finally realized it was the same as everyone else’s. Turns out Society isn’t the enemy they told me it was.
Header image courtesy Skynesher / iStock
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