I want to fit into a box

I want to fit into a box. Kugels get to be in boxes. So do boytjies and tenderpreneurs, cougars and sugar daddies and yummy mummies.

So why not me? I want to be able to describe who I am in a sentence. Life is perplexing, and I’d feel better were I to fit into the comforting embrace of a stereotype: the hermit crab seeking a shell, if you will. So I’m searching for a box to fit into, for the crowd where I can be an individual just like everybody else.

But which one? Once upon a time I fit into the “wife” box, and also “career woman”. Where could I possibly put myself now? This is harder than it might sound.

For instance, I’m not a geek.
I’m not what a friend of mine describes as a “social media douchebag” (although the risks are there).
I’m not part of the Twitterati. To be a bona fide member of the Twitterati, you have to crack an invite to dinner at the US Embassy.
I’m not a hipster. I don’t hang out at Stanley Avenue or Arts on Main and I’m far too uncool to venture anywhere near 70 Juta.

I’m in advertising, but not part of the advertising crowd. I’m over-educated for the ad industry — knowing about concepts like “interpellation” is pointless here — and I know too much about LSMs to be part of the intelligentsia. My first thought when I encounter a challenge is: “how would I get people to buy more of that?” Also, I’ve never actually witnessed coke being snorted despite over a decade of working in agencies.
I’m a writer, but not part of the writing set; at book launches I feel as awkward and out of place as I do at ad industry functions.

I’m not a cougar or even a puma, despite assumptions to the contrary.
I’m not a bunny-boiler. The longest I’ve ever stalked somebody was the half an hour I spent tracking the whereabouts of the fat, chain-smoking psychic I once dated, and I’ve sent one drunk SMS in my entire life.
I’m not a cat lady. As far as my cat is concerned, she is no longer mine.

I live in a nice part of the northern suburbs, but on the charity of family.
I drive a yummy-mummy mobile, but I’m divorced and childless.
I’m white, private school-educated and middle class, but I understand how privileged I am in this fraught historical context, and irony and white middle-class entitlement don’t fit well together.
I’m a limp-wristed liberal, but I collect insults and repeat the rude things other people say.
I’m blonde, but not in spirit.
I’m all too familiar with divides, but I straddle them.*

The truth is I don’t quite fit anywhere, and the friction between the edges of myself and the boxes I try in vain to squeeze into are rubbing me blistered and raw. The only solution is to create a box and hope that others will also feel they belong in it (you don’t want to be on a box on your own; that’s much too lonely). Based on research to date, I think this will end up being a nice, neat-ish stereotype for verbally gifted, dysfunctional women — and men, I won’t discriminate — who enjoy people-watching. The disaster-on-two-legs types who write blogs and don’t see the world in quite the same way as everybody else. The ones who worry their friends and families because they just can’t seem to get it together, not in the conventional sense at any rate.

I want to form a club where we can meet and be all witty and sardonic while we make entertainingly bitchy observations about the people passing by, the ones who fit so neatly into all the other boxes. Where we can compare happy pills as we laugh at the utter incomprehensibility of life and where — and this is the important bit — we can feel comforted by the knowledge that out there is somebody who is just as screwed up and fucked over as we are. Not in a scary bunny-boiler way, that goes without saying, though even bunny-boilers get to have a box of their own.

If I could find a box like that, a box where I could belong, I’m sure I’d settle down to a simpler, less fraught existence, one filled with less anxiety. I’ll just have to keep looking until I find it.

* Despite what you may think, that is not an invitation to make lewd puns.