I wouldn't say I had some sort of enlightened perspective; I really wanted to fit in with the cool kids, it's more just that I'd dealt with rejection for so lon

I wouldn't say I had some sort of enlightened perspective; I really wanted to fit in with the cool kids, it's more just that I'd dealt with rejection for so long that in some ways I'd kind of given up/I didn't have enough social skills to even know how to change that. It didn't even have much to do with my interests; there were people around that I had things in common with, some of whom I became acquainted with, but I just didn't really know how to make real friends. Put differently: I felt like a pariah until the very tail end of high school; it just happened that in middle school I had several unrelated good things happening too.