Blending In, Friend or Foe?

For the past eighteen years of my life I have noticed a common connection when it comes to kids and people in general, we all want to blend in. People tend to want to be the same as everyone else than to be ostracized for their differences. From personal experience, blending in has proven to be safer than to make a stance that you may not have intended to make in the first place. But I did not learn how to blend in on my own. Blending in has been practiced for so long, adults engrain social norms onto their kids, which leads to their kids blending in, and it’s all one big messy cycle. When it comes to blending in, some people can do it far better than others. Take David Sedaris for example, was a gay kid growing up in North Carolina where the holiest you could be, was at a football game. In the first chapter “Carolina” from Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris was taken out of class to go to speech therapy. It was not just speech therapy for mispronouncing your “r’s” or for a lisp, but boys who spoke with a lisp a tad too effeminate, or the pitch of their voices were a bit too high for the macho men of North Carolina. Speech therapy in general is great for kids who struggle with speaking in front of their class or other people in general, but therapy for those who don’t speak to one’s standards doesn’t seem to me to be okay at all. When is it okay to tell kids that the way they are isn’t okay? A quote that really stuck out to me from this passage is, “She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA” (Sedaris). These kids were being told they were different from a very young age. It wasn’t even that their differences were acknowledged, it was that the school was telling them they needed to change. They were told they needed to be “normal.” If you ask me, being normal is totally overrated, and I believe everyone deserves to be whatever the hell they feel like being. Telling someone to change for the sake of normalcy is sickening, and we need to let those kids with “lisps” that they’re not less than just because of the way they act or talk. You. Do. You.