How to Stop Caring About Being'Cool' + Well-Liked?

Why the pursuit of popularity is a prison.

It’s not flattering to admit, but I’ve spent a good portion of my life chasing popularity and “coolness.” I wanted to be in with the types of people who treated me at best with indifference, and at worst: blatant contempt.

As a late-diagnosed Autistic person who only recently really started to figure out who I really am, it’s hard not to mourn all of the years I lost trying to be somebody else. The only thing my pursuit of likability has every brought me is misery, and after decades years of trying, I’ve finally put the chase to rest. These days I genuinely like who I am, and mourn all of the years I never got to know me because I was so caught up in everyone else’s idea of who I should be.

I spent my 20s striving to be the kind of popular ‘it girl’ I saw splashed on the pages of Nylon Magazine and later—Tumblr. My quest to be cool and well-liked left me feeling emptier and emptier until I woke up one day in my mid-30s realizing I built a life that might’ve looked good on paper, but ultimately had nothing to do with who I really am and what I really want.

I now see it for what it is: a case of people pleasing to the extreme, and lately I’ve been asking myself the question “When did all of this bullshit even start?”

Masking is a thing that EVERYONE does and Allistic and Autistic women alike have been given very specific and limiting instructions on who they should and should not be. The difference for Autistics is that the mask we are told to wear is so far from who we actually are, that there’s often no choice but to lose ourselves in the pursuit of it.

While children should be taught to be kind, they should also be taught that if someone doesn’t want to accept your kindness, it’s their problem— not yours. Girls are especially socialized to believe that likability is a virtue, and that in and of itself is a huge reason there’s a much higher percentage of undiagnosed Autistic women walking around. When Autistic girls aren’t allowed to be who they are, they often grow into women on an obsessive chase to be all of the things they aren’t.

So today—dear friends— we’re going in a slightly different direction than usual. I’m going to share an unreleased comic that I made a few years ago. When I first created it, poking fun at my weirdo child self felt cathartic for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, but now that I know I am Autistic, it reads a bit more sinister.

I hope you enjoy, and as always - I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

---

The media portrays the concept of popularity as something that is confined to the hallways of middle and high schools. The truth is, I can’t remember a time in my early childhood where I was put in a social setting that did not have some sort of popularity ecosystem. Even in early grade school, it felt like some kids just had an ‘it factor’— an aura of superiority that made me feel like they had everything way more figured out than I ever could.

It was very clear that whatever the secret sauce was for being cool, I did not have it.

Coolness eluded me and I wanted to figure out how to crack the code so that I could begin reaping all of the benefits I perceived it to come with.

At family gatherings, it was unspoken that the older cousins were the cool ones. I knew this because they acted aloof and were constantly locking us younger cousins out of bedrooms where they were doing god-knows-what kind of mysterious activities together. As the oldest of the youngest cousins, I felt considerably slighted by this.

In third grade, the popular group in my class consisted of 5 girls who, to me, might as well have been movie stars. 

From my perch in the distance I studied their outfits, eavesdropped on their convos, and watched in awe as they pulled various overly-processed 90s kid delicacies out of their brown paper lunch bags.

In the secrecy of my bedroom, I gathered 5 ragtag dolls and sprawled a popular girl’s name onto each of them.

 I’d then dress up in my finest and pretend we were all friends.

I’d love to say that this is where my quest to be a cool girl ended.

I’d also like to say that this is where I stopped yearning desperately for the love and acceptance of people who barely seemed to acknowledge that I existed. However, it’d be many decades before anything close to that level of self-love and acceptance began to stick for me.