Taken from the text of a Tumblr post of the same name.
I accompanied my mom to pick up my brother from school today.
As we parked in a parking lot in front of the school, I saw a boy embrace a girl. For some reason, it got to me. And suddenly, I remembered how desperately I tried to fit in.
I tried for four years to fit in. I looked for a square hole, yet found none. The school was full of round pegs: the Student Council people, athletes (who eternally never won a game— yet were given huge scholarships), the dumb-asses who never did anything yet complained about their grades.
The right space existed for them.
But not for me. I was a square-peg in a round-peg hole. Neither popular nor unknown; liked yet unnoticed; Talkative yet quiet. An oxymoronic existence in a world that has no distinctive definition.
Yet, I found my niche in a group of square pegs. We gathered together and enjoyed each other’s company. We laughed at the round pegs, for they conformed to everything we had begun to dislike.
The yearbook might have been filled with photographs of the Student Council people. Yes, the yearbook might have been filled with the photographs of athletes that never won. Yes, the yearbook might have been filled with those people who conformed, and fit in.
But something that the yearbook didn’t show was how us square-peg kids, the kids without a space, made our own niche. A special estuary in which we grew and blossomed into our current morphs. We learned that we could go up and beyond the round-pegs, be better, and carry ourselves in a fashion that was unlike any other method.
As the boy-girl couple separated, I looked back towards my brother and his friends. I saw not only friends, but square-pegs.
It looks like he’s found his niche, way earlier than I found mine.
As we drove away, I thought of all the other square-pegs, and hoped to whatever higher power there is, that they find their niche, the estuary that will take them up and beyond… far above the world of the round-pegs and their conformity.
