Prompt – Learning what “cool” meant.
Cool, according to younger me, was all about visibility. As someone who had created an entire science and creed around being invisible, confidence and cool had everything to do with being perceived or seen as cool, with the key being seen. I was not cool, or so I thought at the time. I was the kid who followed the rules not just to follow them, but so others would leave me alone long enough for me to be by myself. Later, quietly and often in private, I bucked the system in smaller ways by reading, writing, and thinking – so cool, I know! Somewhere inside all of that, I was cool; however, I did not believe it then and neither did the crowd that measured such things.
As a military kid moving every time the base commander sneezed or shifted the wind, I watched cool from the sidelines before I ever tried to step into it. Each new school carried its own language, its own hierarchy, its own unwritten rules about who mattered and why. There were a few universals about sports and money, but every place crowned a different tribe, and the traits that defined them did not always match the last place. Still, that tribe always seemed untouchable. They walked into a room as though the room had been waiting for them all along. I walked in hoping to pass unnoticed. Red hair, my weight, and my own doubts made invisibility nearly impossible, so I studied cool long before I allowed myself to imagine becoming it.
At first, I believed cool meant rebellion and risk. The kid who talked back. The group that laughed too loudly in the cafeteria. They looked fearless, and fearlessness felt like the opposite of everything I carried. I stayed small, stayed agreeable, stayed quiet enough to avoid friction. Inside, though, something restless kept pressing forward. Every time I watched someone question an adult or challenge a rule that did not make sense, I felt admiration tangled with envy. They looked free, even though many of them were simply bound to a different kind of baggage.
It took years to understand that what I had been seeing was not freedom; it was performance. And sometimes it was armor. The loudest rebellion rarely held the deepest courage. I began to notice “real cool” in quieter acts. The student who asked a thoughtful question when everyone else stayed silent. The friend who told the truth even when it complicated things. The teacher who admitted uncertainty and invited the class into the work of figuring it out together. Those moments did not look cinematic or dramatic, yet they felt grounded in something honest…something cool.
Cool stopped being about defiance and became more about authenticity. It became the willingness to show up fully, even when that meant standing alone for a moment. The people I came to respect as cool were not trying to be different; they were simply refusing to disappear because of their difference.
Looking back, I see that my definition of cool was always tangled up with belonging. I thought cool meant breaking rules because I believed that was the only way to be noticed. What I know now is quieter and more complicated. Cool is not the volume of rebellion; it is the clarity of self. It is the slow decision to speak when silence would be easier. It is the courage to ask questions, not to disrupt for attention, but to understand more deeply.
Somewhere along the way, watching from the edges, I began to ask my own questions. Not loudly. Not in ways that made a scene. Just enough to feel the ground shift under my own feet. Cool stopped looking like rebellion and started feeling like recognition. The loudest people in the room were not always the freest; many of them were just better at hiding their fear in plain sight. What I had once called invisible was never absence. It was observation. It was patience. It was a boy learning how to belong to himself before belonging to any crowd. And maybe that is what cool finally became; not a performance to be witnessed, but a quiet agreement between who I was and who I no longer needed to pretend to be.
Muddled Soma 