One of the most humiliating experiences of my working life was when I went to interview my hero, John Waters. I was wearing my favourite dress, and he approached with a blank smile, saying: “You’re here to meet me. I could tell by your outfit.” That cold wind of shame as I remembered I was not unique, that I was as recognisable as any other type of fan, a Trekkie, perhaps, wearing a pair of Silly Putty ears. Or one of those grown women who really love Hello Kitty and must display her mouthless face on all her accessories, all the time, even in court. I shivered at the memory again this week, when I read Waters’s new book, Make Trouble, a transcript of the graduation speech he gave at Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.

In this speech, typically hilarious and wise, the director who became notorious for a film where his drag queen muse literally ate shit, said in fact Hairspray (a musical about a fat girl who loves to dance) was the most transgressive movie he ever made. “Pink Flamingos was preaching to the converted. But Hairspray is a Trojan horse: it snuck into Middle America and never got caught.” His advice to the students in front of him was to stop being an outsider. To refuse to isolate themselves in comfortable niches, to listen to their political enemies, and then figure out a way to make them laugh. To cause trouble from the inside. Which strikes me as quite… radical.

The idea of outsiderness still holds huge sentimental currency – sales of sunglasses are steady even through winter. But nobody wants to admit that standing apart from a crowd is as much of a pose as wriggling your way in. A common theme in the stories celebrities tell about themselves is the admission that they felt like an outsider growing up, and it works for a number of reasons. Fans get to marvel at their own depth, confident that they would have seen through the freckles to the beauty beneath had they sat behind this celebrity in geography in 1996. And also it places this celebrity apart, a little to the left, a little above, a different thing to a normal human child, special.

Nobody wants to admit that standing apart from a crowd is as much of a pose as wriggling your way in

The problem with this admission, of course, is that everybody feels like an outsider. No teenager feels like they belong, feels known and beautiful. As we grow older we find ways of hiding that anxiety, but it rises again at fancy parties, and when walking into a strange office. People are all seconds, slightly cracked but made on the same machine – everybody feels misunderstood and “awkward”, and they hang on to it because it’s romantic. In our world, outsiderness is held up as a fundamental character trait rather than a side-effect of being human, or something that changes with your sugar levels, or how long you slept last night.

Yet trying to be unique takes just as much work as trying to be like everybody else, and sometimes it’s fun, and creative and a bit of a laugh, but sometimes it makes you feel like a deflated box of wine, soggy and dangerous and empty in the wrong places. There is an idea that it’s important to be authentic to your true, outcast self, but to do that all day would be exhausting.

Learning the rules which allow you to play inside, with all the change and disruption that enables, is a valuable skill. And one which would no doubt be helpful right now, for those of us who feel left out of political conversation, or suspect they’re not being challenged in ways that would make their arguments stronger.

The beauty of faking it – of sauntering through life as if you think you belong – is that soon you will recognise that posture in someone else, and then another person, and then another. And soon it will become clear that every single other comfortable-looking fool is trying really hard, all the time. Once that happens, not only can you start to cause trouble of the sort Waters wants, but your life suddenly stretches out ahead like a seascape, full of possibility and shadow.

Of course, it’s easy to say words like this, in that order, but it’s harder to shrug off the feeling that you are odd, and different, and a binbag of haunted salamis expertly painted to look like a functioning person. The embarrassing thing is not that I wore a dress that identified me as part of a crowd, but that being identified as part of a crowd embarrassed me.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman