In my previous years, and especially during middle school, I was always the unenthusiastic, unengaged, ugh-mom-this-is-so-lame-can-I-go-home-yet person you could always count on to roll their eyes at anything they deemed “cheesy” or “unrealistic.”

I’m not proud of it, and I know how irritating I must have been back then. It didn’t occur to me how unhappy I was acting like that until I had a particular conversation over the summer with my friend from another school. He was a bit older than I was.

The conversation took place at a dance and went something along the lines of this:

        “Oh my god, this music is so mindless,” I groan. “Music is so superficial.”

        “Hey, wait a minute.” My friend raises his eyebrows. “That’s not true.”

        “Okay, yeah, well, you know what I mean.” I flap a hand in his direction. Obviously, there were outliers, like Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Or something.

        “You can’t dance to Pink Floyd, Lizzy.”

        “Yeah, and why would I want to dance?”

        “Because it’s fun.” He shrugs and turns away, scanning the dance floor for a moment before waving at someone I can’t see and strolling away. “Join us later, if you want.”

After those words, I realized that the rest of the room was, in fact, dancing, and we had been fully enmeshed in the corner of the room, trying to seem as cool as possible. I’d like to say that that was when I was snapped out of my painfully pretentious phase, but unfortunately. that conversation was only the start of my belated revelation that sometimes it was cool to be passionate about things. Desirable, even.

It was a hard realization to come to. If I had been asked about this several years ago, I would have said that it was cool to be the apathetic ones in the corner, rolling their eyes at society in general and not doing much of anything.

 In a way, the Harker atmosphere in middle school played a lot into the “it’s cool to be disengaged” vibe that I shared with a lot of my classmates. There was an almost stifled aura to that place, and it took far more introspection to break out of my passion-less shell than I would like to admit. People were more likely to be doing homework than participating in an after-school spirit event.

Now, though, I see passion as a more attractive quality in anyone than apathy. I want to know what makes someone keep going or what makes someone ridiculously happy, whether it be moshing to Top 40’s hits or getting excited about a video game. These days, I’m the biggest music fan that I know, no matter if the music is about contemplating the fate of humans in the universe or about how much you want to get with that girl that lives down the hall.

Sometimes, you’re looking for a fun night out and not agonized self-reflection.