Skaters and Preps

Middle school wasn’t like elementary school. Some kids had beards.

Others were completely prepubescent. I was 10 when I started 6th grade, although I did turn 11 early into the year. Imagine being eleven years old and seeing kids with beards, and girls at various stages of puberty, all the way from zero to completion.

What could go wrong?

My first day introduced me to two distinct cultures of kids I didn’t realize existed. These two powerful factions seemed to run my middle school.

First up were the skaters. These kids were aptly named, and there was no mystery behind the strong skateboard culture that permeated the undercurrents of juvenile life.

Skateboarding was a way to rebel against the mainstream way of life, but it was much more than that. I wasn’t a skater myself, but I got to know a lot of them over the next few years.

Some skaters really stood out by having a distinct haircut we called a sling. This haircut involved shaving underneath one side of the hair, so a very long strip sort of folded over, a lot like the Misfits.

Skaters also listened to punk rock music, but I wasn’t a skater, so that’s not how I was eventually introduced to punk.

Preps were the polar opposite of skaters. They dressed neatly, emphasizing brand name clothing at all times, showcasing their wealth whenever possible.

These kids were so-called because they were preparing for college, destined to go on to big things in life. Incidentally, I myself always felt as though I was certainly going to college immediately after high school, but I never felt as though I fit in with the preps.

Also, I didn’t know where the term “prep” came from. There was no Google back then, and it was sometimes dangerous to ask the wrong questions in middle school. You might be made fun of, or you might get beaten up. It was truly a time of fear for me much of the time.

Preps were ruthless in terms of the use of sarcasm and irony, something they seemed to weaponize against me from day one. However, while groupthink pervaded both groups, the preps had plenty of individuals who simply didn’t fit this mold, who had probably stumbled into this faction themselves without deciding to be there.

Preps were generally good study partners, and most of them were smart enough to have interesting conversations with, provided a conversation actually began. Skaters seemed more exotic to me, somehow getting away with wearing things I never could get away with wearing, and many of them were extremely good at creative thinking.

I desperately wanted to fit in with both groups, although I didn’t really understand why that was so important, other than recognizing that I had generally been friendly with most kids in elementary school, or else I had been oblivious to any factions like these.

This was probably my first real-life exposure to political factions. I had absolutely no idea how to navigate them, so I did what any kid in my predicament would do: waited for every day to end so I could go home and play outside with my friends, or play D&D, or draw comic books.

Political factions are everywhere, not just in local and national election cycles. I never did end up joining either group, although in retrospect I would probably identify a great deal more with the skaters, who seemed to be rebelling directly against what the preps represented.

It was more complicated than that, though, as both sides respected the power of the other, and an uneasy peace seemed to last through middle school.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was in a position to navigate through these various factions. In high school, the skaters faded into obscurity as the 1990s approached, and new factions were introduced to my world. Preps were still one of the dominant groups, but now there were jocks, artists, drama folks, ROTC kids, metal-heads, punks, and at least half a dozen more I’m forgetting.

By high school, I was friends with people in nearly all of these groups. If I wasn’t friends with someone from a group, I was almost certainly cordial with someone.

I’m fairly certain that two things led to this success (relative to my dismal failure in middle school). First, I was determined from day one to reinvent myself. My first day of 9th grade saw me determined to leave those middle school years behind, and so I became a class clown of sorts, cutting up in class. In one way, I tricked myself into being more extroverted than I normally felt comfortable being.

Krista Madsen over at

SleepyHollowInk

interviewed me about my introversion—you can read that piece here if you’re interested.

Kristi Koeter

and I have also bonded over our shared introversion (read my conversations with her here and here). I’ve enjoyed thinking through the sort of forced extroversion I’ve described, and I recommend checking out their work when you get a chance.

The second thing was that I wrestled in high school. This simultaneously elevated me to a member of the jock faction, but it also opened doors to the prep faction, unlocking connections I might never have otherwise made. Choosing to wrestle itself was a conscious reinvention, so it might be simpler to attribute my high school “success” in navigating these factions to very conscious choices to reinvent how I presented myself to the public at large.

Looking out there into a world of extreme factionalization and echo chambers, I see a macrocosm of middle school. People are frozen, just like middle-school-me, and it takes a leap of courage in order to get to know someone from inside one of these groups. It can be intimidating to have a conversation with someone you don’t think you could have anything in common with, but I’m here to tell you that we all have things in common.

Getting people to that metaphorical first day of high school, where you can sort of reinvent yourself, needs to be a goal for our society. The paradox of the internet is such that it drives folks away, while simultaneously offering togetherness in a way that has never been possible. The way you navigate through this will determine how narrow or broad your worldview is.