Misfit Solitude: An Observer Looking in From the Outside

Although I was already approaching 40 by my 21st birthday, my life didn't really start till I landed in the USA at age 20, ready to start my University years.

The above is not really a contradiction, even if it sounds like one!

Although I was born old I'd really had no life of my own till 6,000 miles separated me from my family.

I suppose there are lots of people who would look at that and say "well that's pretty normal; children don't have lives of their own until they become adults!"

Whereas I can appreciate that, at least on the surface, it fails to grok the sheer depth of not having a life of your own... including being denied your own experiences, your own feelings and pretty much anything other than what fit neatly into a particular canned doctrine.

I went to a particularly large university, and there was something extremely appealing about being able to disappear into a student body of some 51,000 people. Nobody knew me there, and I could be completely anonymous and yet be part of the ebb and flow of energy.

Perhaps what I felt most hopeful about was that this was an opportunity to create myself from the ground up, without the influence of family. I was keenly aware that my strange upbringing had left me without a whole body of life experiences that most "normal" kids of age 20 had under their belts.

It didn't take me all that long to learn that I didn't actually vibe very much with that student body energy, except in a very few isolated cases.

In retrospect, I think I used to overly romanticize connections with other people perhaps because they were so extraordinarily rare. Perhaps that's not explained super well... what I mean is that I felt utterly alone in the huge crowd except for the rare, rare, rare occasion on which a single fellow traveler of life actually had a similar energy as I did.

It made me particularly aware of the fact that I was a very strange bird in a strange land. There was nothing about all these people that I related to. Sure, I "made an effort," as it was suggested to me that I should... but I could never get past the sensation that I was "faking it."

It felt a little bit as if everybody was playing a game, and I had arrived on the scene without knowing that there even was a game.

I look back on that experience of feeling like an outsider, and realize today that what I most of all noticed was that all these people my own age seem to be a good 10 years younger than me. Relatively speaking, anyway.

As I said before, I was born old!

I spent a total of five years at University. Even though I tried my best to "integrate," I was never able to feel like anything but an outsider looking in. I suppose I should have felt vindicated that my strange upbringing wasn't just part of my imagination, but was manifesting in very real ways. However, as an insecure 20-year-old, I just felt a bit depressed about it.

I have heard it said that people who don't feel like they fit into society generally are choosing to make it so. I have to disagree with that statement, rather strongly. Trying to do something you don't particularly enjoy, over and over again, doesn't mean you suddenly enjoy it, it just means you become familiar with it.

In many ways, I didn't fully grow into myself until probably my mid thirties. Although biology obviously would say otherwise, I don't think I was ever "young."

I used to feel rather regretful about having missed an important part of life. However, the more I age, the more I have made peace with my misfitness and the more I forget about feeling like I missed out on youth.

Maybe this all sounds like a very strange thing to be saying. However, it was a story that sort of brewed up in my mind today, so I decided to share it.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!

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Created at 2024-03-22 02:50 PDT
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