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Joiner vs avoider | by naughtonlucy
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Joiner vs avoider

I have never been a ‘joiner’.

I refused categorically to join the Brownies, It was not open for discussion. I did not want to wear brown and sit in a dank wooden hut being bossed around.

 

In her attempts to socialise me my mother somehow got me to join a swimming club AND a ballet class in one of my weak moments. I was not happy. Dreading the afternoons where instead of going home and eating biscuits in front of cartoons I would be dragged off to yet more damp halls and have to change into more outfits.

 

I arrived at my first session of ballet expecting to be presented with a beautiful pearl encrusted bodice and tutu with shimmering satin point shoes. This was my biggest incentive to join. Instead I was given a pale blue, lycra-free leotard and disappointing looking, pitta bread shoes with elastic across the front. We sat in circles doing the ‘good toes naughty toes exercise’ for what felt like six months.

 

There was one solitary boy in our class. The poor bugger. I remember him looking like a Romanian orphan all little and frail with a number one cut and a black leotard. Nowadays I would much rather hang out with the boys than the girls but in those days girls were safe and didn’t have clammy hands. Being new and having no allies I was the one who had to dance with the boy. I think I spent the entire length of the hall that we had to prance down pulling away from him as hard as I could with thundering, angry stomps.

 

At the end of the lesson I pointed out to my mother that I was hugely unsatisfied; No fancy costume fit for the Nutcracker (regardless of whether I could actually even do ‘good toes’ yet), no fancy shoes. At the end of one long hour, I was not able to get my leg up as high as my head; I was not clonking around on point doing pliés, développés, grand fouetté en tournant, dégagés, grand rond de jambe, rond de jambe en l'air, coupés, battements tendus, attitudes, arabesques, and all types of pirouettes. Being subjected to the humiliation ‘clammy hands’ as my partner took the absolute biscuit (which he smelt of).

 

I informed my mother that I would be resigning herewith reasoning that I now wanted to concentrate my efforts on swimming.

Two weeks later I informed my mother that I would be resigning herewith from swimming because I wanted to concentrate on being alone and avoiding ‘joining in.’

 

It continued throughout primary school. I waged a war against ‘country dancing’. I trained a renegade band of girls not to join. We would continue to play ‘off ground touch’ and stealing the boy’s footballs and then kicking them in the shins in preference.

Little by little my gang shrunk. Each week another member slunk off to wear the apricot skirt of the ‘dancers’ until one day it was me, sat alone in the playground, not dancing and not kicking boys.

 

So I joined.

 

I hated to admit it, I loved it.

 

Naturally I had to bring a little of rebellion to it though and when we went ‘on tour’ to the school down the road I managed to start a country dancing riot against the girls who wore lilac skirts.

 

Why do some kids resist ‘joining in’ with such fervour whilst others happily accept every new membership to club and lesson?

 

I am still exactly as I was at 6 years old. I joined a running club last year and quit after a few months because I couldn’t see the point of waiting around all day to go running with a bunch of strangers making small talk when I could go running on my own whenever I felt like it, in silence and think hateful, angry thoughts to help me get up the tough hills and stop to stroke horses in fields and flirtatious cats if I so desired.

 

I cannot bear having some ‘thing’ looming at the end of my day that I must do, even if in theory I quite like what I will be doing. It ruins all the idle hours before, taints them with a countdown to the ‘activity’ and gives me time to build up dread.

 

So I want to know chaps, who is a joiner and who is an avoider?

  

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Taken on May 16, 2008