The Experiment

 We'd just moved onto a ten-acre plot of land, only a farmer's wheat field and a forest trail away from the country school of Waterloo Elementary. I remember a dusty back road, sunshine, and tall spruce trees. My grade-three teacher, Mr. Baker, looked like Santa Clause. He called me 'love' and read the Hobbit out loud to our class every day. 

To me, that small school of one hundred kids felt enormous. Over the last four years, homeschooling had left me with an inflated sense of self and no understanding of social norms and taboos. Some of this was good (I was willing to make friends with anyone). Some things were hard. As a homeschool kid, I believed my parents knew everything about fashion and being cool. So I let my mom dress me in a white turtle-neck and bright pink corduroy overalls with big white buttons for my first day. That was a mistake.

I learned fast, though. I figured out who the cool kids were. I dressed like them and worked hard to insert myself into their social circles. I wore baggy sweatshirts and ripped jeans. I side-parted my long hair from one ear to the other. Being at the right place, at the right time, with the right people, saying the right things meant everything to me.

Fricken grade three. After about six months, I felt like I had done it. I was popular. It was exhausting. I spent more brainpower maintaining my social status than learning my multiplication tables (and it shows to this day, pop quiz me 12X7, and I'll panic a little inside).   

And then came the Experiment: the Day that Changed Everything.

A skinny young man with leather writing patches on his blazers' elbows came to visit the class. He explained that he was doing an experiment around the way people communicate with one another. 

We all received folding cardboard blinders to prop up on our desks and a handful of colourful wooden blocks. The man explained that he would build something with blocks behind the blinder he'd set up for himself at the front of the room.

Then the young man pulled out a floppy $100 bill from his wallet and waved it through the air. The room became pin-drop silent. 

"If you can build your blocks exactly the way that I build mine, simply by listening to my instructions, I will give you this $100 bill right now," he said.

We grabbed our blocks and buried their heads into our makeshift cubicles.

"Put the green triangle on the orange square. Put the purple triangle next to the orange square, put the blue triangle on top."

The room vibrated with focus, each kid laying their blocks with the precision of an "Operation" game player. After setting a few blocks down, I leaned back a little to stretch my neck. I accidentally caught a glimpse of another kid's blocks, and a shock ran through me.

I glanced towards another desk and what I saw confirmed my suspicion: both kids on either side of me had arranged their blocks differently from mine. I'd been placing my pieces in parallel to one another while the other kids had stacked their blocks horizontally into pointy towers. I'd been doing it totally wrong.

In a flash of panic, I destroyed my design before anyone else could see. I rebuilt the blocks to match the towers of my friends. How could I have been thinking so wrong?

To this day, this story still hurts to think about, much less write. The young man at the front finished describing his pattern, and we all dropped our blinders. 

Everyone in the class had built neatly stacked piles of blocks. However, the young man's blocks were arranged flat and parallel to each other, precisely how I'd set mine up a moment before.

The young man blew out his cheeks and laughed. He waved his $100 bill once more in the air before tucking it back into his wallet.

"You know," he said, "I've done this experiment at dozens of schools, and no one has ever replicated one of my patterns, but I still get nervous every time."

And I knew, with terrible, finite certainty, that no one would ever believe that I had matched his pattern but then destroyed my work moments before the reveal... all because I was afraid of being different.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, but the lesson behind this moment imprinted upon my young brain and encoded itself into my DNA.

That I must never EVER be the same as anyone else, ever again.

Which, of course, is a philosophy that has led to all sorts of misadventures (stories for another time). But it sure makes life interesting.

And I don't even care whether you believe me or not.

😆