A few weeks before I started ninth grade, I had a mind-expanding epiphany. Keep in mind that, at 14 years old, it didn’t take much to make me gasp and get all agog at my own thoughts, but still: I had a moment of self-aware clarity that remains with me.

I dedicated my 8th grade year to a dogged pursuit of popularity. I charted out the people in my class, drawing graphs of who fraternized with who, and where how they aligned with other affinity groups. If it hadn’t been so desperate, the activity could have been a really interesting social science project, but of course I was only mapping people out so that I could determine who I wanted to spend time with, and who I should avoid.

I even made a dice-based board game for myself, complete with steps along the way like “T waves at you during lunch — advance two spaces” or “M asks you about an assignment in the hall, and everyone sees you talking to her — go back three spaces.”

This sounds cruel and awful, and it was. Keep in mind, however, that all my desperate attempts to climb the social ladder were complete failures — I suffered for all my cruel efforts. I abandoned my best friend Susannah for several months, convince that she was somehow dragging me down. The result? I didn’t have a best friend any more, and I was still unpopular. I won’t go into all the other pathetic 13-year-old things I did while trying to prove that everyone should like me. Just rest assured that they were equally deplorable, equally ill-advised, and equally ineffective.

So, while on a camping trip the month before I started high school, I had a reflective moment when I realized that everything I’d tried to do the year before had failed. I’d placated and appealed, bribed and wheedled, and still: people didn’t like me. I’d compromised just about every social ethic I had, and still: people didn’t like me. I’d tried dressing differently, acting differently and complimenting people; I’d tried stoking egos, being loud, and keeping quiet. Nothing worked. I remained outside “the inner circle,” as I called it.

Then, like lightning, it came to me: no matter what I did, someone wouldn’t like me. And if I was always going to be disliked by somebody, I might as well stop trying to impress the rest of the world and start trying to like myself. That way, at least I wouldn’t have to suffer the double agony of being disliked and a total loser.

I realize that this isn’t much of a epiphany, but at the time it about blew my head off. I was instantly freed from the shackles of trying to impress my peers…they would never like me! Ever! So why bend over backwards trying to appeal to people who could never be impressed? I might as well do my own thing … that way, when people didn’t like me, I was confident in the knowledge that I already knew it, and didn’t need it. I wasn’t trying to impress them or make them like me. I was doing what made me like myself.

Naturally, this resulted in my becoming much more of a weirdo. Susannah and I got so bizarre that sometimes it was like we were speaking our own language of weirdness. We sang songs about Rudolph the radio-active cocaine-snorting reindeer, and created an alternate reality (complete with elaborate illustrations) wherein we would grow up to live in trailers side-by-side and have so many bastard children that we’d lose track of who’s was who. Her imaginary husband’s name was Opie Ludermeyer. We still weren’t popular, but we laughed until we shat ourselves and eventually found a circle of friends who were equally self-entertaining. It all worked out in the end.

The moral of the story? Despite the fact that my epiphany in 1989 wasn’t really all that groundbreaking, I still find myself sort of living by the same rules. What’s the point in trying to impress people? You’re doomed to fail, and you might as well impress the one that matters: that judgmental bitch staring back at you in the mirror.