Welcome to Summer Cooldown, our weeklong tribute to all things cool in pop culture. Through our role models of chill and our misguided attempts to emulate them, to the DGAF heroes so defiantly uncool they’re ice cold, we’ll attempt to define the undefinable and celebrate the characters and questions that shaped us.

It’s not that difficult to be cool at a private, college prep school. The answer is right there in the name. To at least appear cool, to blend in and eventually become indistinguishable from those who definitely are cool, one simply has to look preppy. At the “private, nonsectarian, coeducational, college preparatory” (according to its own description) school I attended from fifth to twelfth grade, cool meant Abercrombie, Ralph Lauren, Ugg, Lacoste, and whatever store in the Short Hills mall sold those hideously fleecy North Face jackets.

As easy as that formula seems, I never managed to crack it. My middle school years were spent copying what I thought was a surefire method of appearing cool to my peers, but that effortless merge into the preppy masses never clicked. My hair was too curly and frizzy to tie up with a single white ribbon, and the preppy dress code of pastel polos and khakis made me look like an explosion at the Easter factory. My thick arm hair snagged on Livestrong bracelets and silly Bandz, and my big lips looked obscene in glassy lip gloss (it was the mid-aughts). My rich, white classmates looked fine because the preppy lifestyle was made precisely for them, but there was no room in that paradigm for an awkward, black, Puerto Rican girl to feel welcome. I spent four years feeling half a degree behind a cool curve my peers were born to follow.

Combine my feelings of isolation with the hormonal tsunami of being fourteen, then add a statistically expected onset of clinical depression and an abundance of self-hatred. That was where I was in the summer before high school, when the Internet took pity on me and opened my eyes to a new form of cool. This cool was the polar opposite to that of my classmates, and in my teen naïveté I assumed that meant it was made for me.

Folks, I found emo.

I don’t think I can explain the extent to which emo opened my heart. To fully find the words I would have to re-harness the energy of my teenage self and somehow feel again a process that can only be felt once. Discovering emo as a genre of music, a style of dress, and a lifestyle was like finding the only real mirror in a funhouse that had never, ever been fun for me. I latched hard onto bands that, in retrospect, barely skimmed the surface of “real” emo but spoke to me nonetheless — bands like Dashboard Confessional, who were so sad and beautiful it hurt to listen to them, or Fall Out Boy, who sang about feeling angry and rejected. Don’t even get me started on JamisonParker, Coheed and Cambria (I know, they’re not actually emo), and My Chemical Romance. For the first time, I thought I had found a standard of cool that had room for me.

Cue a fourteen year old mixed black kid falling headfirst into a subculture predicated on sadness and emotion, on skinny jeans, black tee shirts, and rectangular dark-rimmed eyeglasses, and doing so at a nearly all-white prep school in New Jersey. The harder I loved emo, the more I stood out, but this time I had a choice as to whyI looked different. In later years my college literature professors would teach me about the concept of identifying against the metaphorical other, but I was living that praxis before I turned sixteen. I ruined my natural hair pattern by flat ironing it into the bang swoop and feathered layers that defined emo girl hair, I blacked out the area around my eyes with drugstore eyeliner, and knew that even if I was alone, I still belonged to something.

It’s embarrassing, you know, to think about this now. I’m not embarrassed by what I wore when I was a teen, or how much I loved music that could today be viewed as objectively bad (a lot of mid-00s emo holds up, though. The Black Paradestill slaps), but by what comes next in this story. Even if I can’t remember the exact amorous high that hit when I discovered counterculture, I vividly recall the pain I felt when I realized I had escaped into something that would hurt me just as much as what I had fled, and for the same reasons.

A few years into my emo phase, I still wanted to belong to something bigger. MySpace was picking up around this time, and the emo and emo-adjacent teens of the world were congregating online in a loosely bound and shallow celebration of our weird, dark selves. We were still countering preps and anything “mainstream,” but the visual medium of MySpace lent itself to something different. The Scene was born. Scene kids could listen to emo but also ironically enjoyed pop and screamo. They had colorful hair, impeccable makeup, and a fashion sense that was half-Harajuku, half–Morticia Addams. Looking back now, Scene Kids were a remarkably sophisticated first attempt at a social media–driven group identity, spooky precursors to the clone-stamped Instagram influencers and YouTube stars of today.

Just like at school, scene kid cool had a formula. Where my classmates’ uniform of pastels and Vineyard Vines was the key in real life, striped hair extensions and diamond-shaped plastic necklaces were our talismans of belonging. The easiest way to be “in” was to be accepted into a MySpace train, an invite-only group that accepted members based on how attractive and scene-looking they were. The rules were simple, and I liked simple. These were, after all, my people.

There in the dark, with my thousands of MySpace friends and a formula to follow, I merged my love of sad girl music with my need to feel accepted. It worked until it didn’t.

A few years past my emo stage and right in the middle of my scene kid career, one of the MySpace trains I belonged to had a message board topic designed to deliberate on potential new members. I was pleased to have passed muster in this particular train, so when the next crop of potentials came up I was proud to do my democratic duty.

The boy couldn’t have been older than fifteen and his hair was visibly dry from straightening his natural curls, just like mine. He might have been mixed but I don’t want to speculate; I just remember he looked as brown as me, even with the contrast on his camera turned all the way up.

“He looks dirty,” a member commented under his picture, “I want to put him in a bath and scrub him up.”

“Black people shouldn’t be scene it’s not right lol.”

“Since when do we accept Mexicans”

“Not our fault white people have better hair.”

I stayed in the group and did not vote. Sometime later I was kicked out. Once I read the way my chosen peers wrote about that boy, I started to look closer at the scene I had joined. Their standard for cool was pale and thin, with wispy, straight hair and shocking blue eyes. The clothes were just as exclusive as my schoolmates, just darker and cut differently. The bands they worshipped were mostly white dudes with guitars, their favorite scene queens were white women who marketed themselves ironically as “thug” caricatures.

None of that was made for me. This was just another crowd into which I could never blend. I quit MySpace and finished high school feeling like I had graduated with a dual degree in white girl cool while my peers hadn’t even bothered to learn my alphabet.

Turns out, escaping New Jersey and going to school in a diverse city does a lot for lost mixed girls like me. My college was still pretty white, but for the first time in my life I had an infinite amount of role models and choices to make for myself. I figured out that I hate trying to be someone else’s cool, and ten whole fucking years later I’m writing this essay. Feeling pretty good about it too. My dead, straightened hair has grown all the way out and my curls are popping. I listen to all kinds of music and wear what I want.

It took a lot to get here. And it still smarts to think about those years in between.

I think a lot about what I would say to them if I could go back in time, to the 6th grader in the lime green polo and the brown-skinned sixteen-year-old with sad, overlined eyes. Would it help to warn them that the people they long to belong with will never love them the way they want? Or is it kinder instead to tell them it all works out and lie about the part where their pursuit of a cool designed to exclude becomes the thing that hurts them the most? It all comes down to which of my present-day dreams is dumber: to completely erase those year of self hatred or simply to have known hope earlier.

It’s not that difficult to say “fuck being cool” when you’re an adult, and you have choices and representation and role models, and you’re in therapy, and you’re medicated, and you have a decade of experience to remind you what happens when you try to force yourself into social shapes your body will never match.

The answer is right there, in the work.