DB

Growing up, there were a good amount of experiences that I did not share with my peers until much later in life. Part of the reason was because my parents had immigrated to the US, and the pool of people who were also being raised in a first-generation, immigrant household was smaller than the pool of people whose families had been in the US for longer. There was also the fact that my parents were reserved, and not very social, so I too did not socialize too much.

It was easy to feel like an outsider within those circumstances, and because of circumstance I did not find my people until much later in life. I felt like I was too interested in nerdy things to truly feel like I could belong with those who were artists and performers, and I was too interested in writing and storytelling to really belong with my beloved nerds, who at the time were more interested in other things like gaming, science, and computers.

I spent a lot of time hanging around these groups of friends by spectating. It wasn’t all I did. Sometimes I would be arm in arm with my buddies as we went about the shenanigans that you get into with friends. But often, I would listen. Perhaps it was my upbringing, and perhaps it was and is my natural disposition, but there was a time where I thought that I was at fault for that.

You know that feeling where you’re hanging around a group of people, and it doesn’t feel like you have a whole lot to say? Where it feels like they’re talking about each other, and never you? That feeling where you could slip into the air and nobody would notice you had left?

That was a feeling I felt a lot, and which I do still feel.

And at a time, it can feel bad and terrible, but I don’t think it has to be. I don’t think it is bad.

It’s this feeling that I’m reminded of when I experience something for the first time…much too late. I read Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth recently. It was an experience many children had growing up, but which I did not. It was such a wonderful experience, and one that I can share with people who have also read it. Sort of.

I wouldn’t have experiences of imaging and traveling to worlds inspired by Milo’s adventures as a child. I wouldn’t be able to credit it as a foundation of my person. And, I wouldn’t have been a quippy child equipped with the lexicon of that word-played world.

When I feel like an outsider, or when I feel alone in a group of people, it’s small and heavy thoughts like that which pull me away. They are nit-pickings of how I don’t belong, and how these people both don’t need me, and that I should leave. They are formed out of a self-hate that is disguised as humility, and an ego that needs others to lean up against, like a wilted vine without a support.

I still have this feeling. It took me many years, but I can more often exist in a space without feeling like I need to leave, or that I’m required to speak. I still struggle with it, but it’s not as bad as it was.

Because of that familiarity with that feeling, I sometimes stand within and apart from people. I notice when others feel that way that I do. And I hope that when I find the moment to bring them into conversation, that they can feel like they belong in the way that I do–with the permission to look up at the canopy of the forest of those bigger voices, to listen at the chatter of their birdsong, and to exist along the bark of a tree, or to sway in the breeze of the forest floor knowing that the quiet can also belong.