Short Sketch About Me as an Outsider

Outsider Sketch Wrapped tightly in a dark blue-green comforter, she snuggles up against the oversized pillows on her dorm room bed. The shades are drawn and only the red and green glow from tiny lights on those ubiquitous little electronic devices breaks the near darkness in her room. The music is low but she can just make out that Pandora is apparently playing a Bach fugue -- or is it Mendelssohn, Beethoven, or perhaps Wagner? It sure wasn't hip-hop or Bob Dylan.

While the "cool" clique of teenage classmates (that she finally was accepted into only to eventually realize it was a counterfeit collaboration) were frolicking about at Friday night beer parties, she preferred the safety, sobriety and seeming security of solitude. She really tried hard from elementary school on up to high school to fit in, to blend in like blueberries poured into a bowl of Aunt Jemima's pancake mix before it hits the hot skillet. Still she felt like an outsider.

Even when she was surrounded by the beautiful people of her school, laughing with their prosaic jokes or walking stride for stride down the freshly waxed floors of the long hallways, she might as well have been climbing Mt. Everest alone or surfing in solitude on the scenic waves in Hawaii. It just wasn't a good fit. Her daydreams to be accepted by this grand group turned out to be nightmares trampled by phoniness and vacuous conversations.

Her first read of Gatsby was of course an assignment in AP English; she enjoyed it and got an "A" for her final take-home essay. Reading through Fitzgerald's masterpiece a second time was a kind of emotional nirvana for her. The novel was like a wake-up call. It was like mom bringing a cool damp washcloth to soothe the forehead of a teenager with a fever -- like a cup of herbal tea with honey served as a daughter gains her strength back after a bout with the flu.

But the second time through Gatsby she related in a far more intellectual and psychological sense to the narrator, Nick Carraway. Like Nick, she had longed to be part of the lifestyle exploding all around her. Like Nick, she was an outsider who could not see the shallowness of the group she longed to belong to -- until, that is, she became immersed in it. Sometimes she felt like the "Other" in a Virginia Wolf novel (albeit unlike Woolf she never came close to suicidal ideation).

Nick was often disgusted by the embroilments and supercilious scenes he witnessed, but he participated anyway. She identified with Nick in a powerful way when he served as a go-between for Gatsby and Daisy because she had done the same kind of match-making in the hopes that the new couple she helped bond would embrace her as a social savior. It was not to be.

Unlike Nick, who kept a lookout for Tom as he engaged in sinful sensual behavior, she didn't have to be gatekeeper for the couple she helped become lovers. For that, she was grateful. And unlike Nick, she never played a voyeuristic role, snooping around couples to see how they were physically / romantically intertwined. But she definitely related to Nick when it came to the moral superiority that supposedly comes from believing.