We all know people who seem quintessentially comfortable in their own skins, who effortlessly fit in to whatever group they want to belong to and reign supreme in their world (at least socially). But, note my use of the word ‘seem’. It is worth pondering whether that is their own lived reality.
I’m prompted to this train of thought by hearing a Radio 3 presenter discuss Edward Elgar as someone who ‘often felt an outsider’. His reputation now implies that he represents the height of Edwardian ‘pomp and circumstance’, the imperial zeitgeist. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, he would seem to have been right inside the system of the day. Yet, as a self-taught musician, that was apparently not his own sense of self. He felt an outsider, because he hadn’t been trained in the formal schools of music like his peers.
I can think of many colleagues who occasionally have let their masks slip to let their insecure inner self creep out. The amazingly successful professor, with prizes a-plenty to their name, who clearly was damaged by being a nerd at their posh public school where the ‘in set’ were the Rugby players. Knowing that, I could see how he always felt that he was on the outside, however much others felt that’s where they were while he was a key central player in the research environment. It didn’t make him an easy person for others to interact with. Or the Fellow of that grandest of Cambridge Colleges, Trinity, who admitted he never felt he truly belonged because he had been educated elsewhere, whereas many on the fellowship were Trinity through and through. The College may have changed (after all, its current Master Sally Davies was not Cambridge educated at all), but that feeling of being an outsider will probably go with him to the grave.
Or there was the senior colleague to whom I was once unburdening myself of the feeling of not fitting in as a female physicist, who startled me by saying when things went wrong for him, or when people were rude, he tried not to believe it was because he was a Jew. Despite having known him and worked closely with him for many years, I’d never known (or indeed thought about) his religious affiliation. For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.
Reading Simon Fanshawe’s book, The Power of Difference, has introduced the word ‘covering’ into my lexicon. I knew the concept because, now I know it is a name, I know how I have used it at different times. It’s not dissimilar to ‘code-switching’, to move between different manners of speaking (something Michelle Obama discusses as a black woman navigating a predominantly white world in her book The Light We Carry); or to the ‘masking’ behaviour of autistic girls Gina Rippon discusses in her recent book The Lost Girls of Autism. Whatever you call it, you’re probably familiar with behaviour along these lines – at least unless you’re incredibly sure of yourself. The feeling you need to act a role in order to fit in with whatever group you’re currently amongst.
The time I remember doing this best, or perhaps I mean worst as I look back at how I behaved with some horror, was at an annual conference in my field. Being one of a paltry number of women, I wanted – fairly consciously – to be ‘one of the boys’. One who was welcome down the pub and seen as a good laugh. So I adopted a persona which was not my own; somewhat raucous and laughing at the double entendres of my associates, downing pints. At some point I decided I had had enough. Perhaps I felt secure enough in my affiliation to the in-crowd to feel I could drop that un-me persona, but I’m sure there will be a generation of men who believed that was the true me.
Was it worth doing? Maybe. It certainly seemed so at the time, yet in retrospect it just feels distasteful. There is a price to pay for acting outside one’s true self. It is important to work out what really matters and what is less important. In order to progress, in science or wherever, it may require you to put on a false sense of confidence as you give a conference presentation or take on some new committee role. That is probably worth doing since no one wants to listen to the lecturer mumbling away inaudibly (however exciting the results), or dropping the committee papers on the floor – less likely in this paperless age admittedly – due to nerves. But pretending to be someone you are not in other ways – as I did when I assumed a cheeky, extrovert and raucous character – is hardly necessary and may backfire. These are difficult balancing acts to get right. Yet each of us, every day, is faced with decisions big or small about how to portray oneself and align it with who we really are.
This post resonated with me. Having a fairly normal upbringing – no posh school, no Oxbridge (although a number of my fellow school friends did go, and my brother), and a series of jobs as a farm labourer, shelf stacker, and factory work – made me feel somewhat of a misfit among my University peers. But maybe that was just in my head because if I dug a little deeper, and talked to my colleagues I found there were a number of us that had essentially the same background. I had this realisation only this year when at a US conference. I went with a group of academics on a trip out to the coast on a quiet morning during the meeting. We all converged on this topic that we were all from similar backgrounds – not much money, had to work in manual jobs to get through university, and therefore we perhaps had that feeling that we didn’t really fit in. Yet, here we were, fitting in. On the flip side I not so long ago had to speak individually to several of my Professorial colleagues about what motivated them. Many of them made the pronouncement that they were not doing this for the money, and that they were sufficiently wealthy for this to just be a hobby. I suudenly felt like an outsider then. There’s no way that I could see my job this way. I need the money. It is a job, albeit one that I enjoy and have a lot of privileges included with it, but I could not do this without the wage. That’s a working class ethic I think that was handed down to me. My mother was always of the mind that I should “find work”. Her father, my grandfather, left school at 15 and went straight into work. Having lost his job, first in the 1930s, and then through TB, I think she felt like work was a precious thing, not to take for granted. I still hold that view in my mind, but coming with that into a room of privileged academics does make me feel like an outsider sometimes. We all felt that at one time or another we’ve had to adapt, particularly among students, since many come from wealthier backgrounds than our own – perhaps more so in the US as in the UK where fees can be astronomical! There’s an old saying that goes “We can speak like them, but they can’t speak like us”. So I definitely adapt, and try my best to hide it when I have to.