And we all can claim this, of being outside the world, always looking in, wanting to be, and feeling at times happy not being, but realizing that this ‘otherness’ is you in the world distinctly lacking.
Of being talked over, trying to get a word into the tumult of the rushing seethe of a room, and nobody is listening.
I have always had the feeling of not belonging, it didn’t matter the setting. And, in not belonging, there was also the feeling of belonging with my self where nobody else wanted to be.
As a boy, the gang had ways of doing things, an understanding and invisible language that somehow eluded me.
I have been passed over and ruled out before I was ever considered in passing. Maybe they thought something was just ‘not right’ with me, and so felt it best to go with the other person. I don’t know. I wonder sometimes…
In a workplace setting, there I am again, sitting at a desk where others pass, without a word or a glance, and in retrospect it doesn’t matter (or maybe it does which is why I am writing this), but I feel this otherness, this isolation is complicit with my state of being, that it was always meant to be.
But I wasn’t completely alone. I was never lonely. I had much contentment with myself. There, alas, in the world of books, the other world opened up and invited me and made feel like I belonged. In there things made sense. People talked my language. Of this I have never disputed.
From books came a new mode of self-expression. I found that I could write with relative ease even though my grades in English classes were relatively dismal. I could not identify grammar particles for the life of me, but I could construct sentences and then paragraphs and, eventually, long spates of prose with relative ease.
With that came an understanding of the world jostled into abstraction, yet somehow making sense in a convoluted way, as if my understanding was drawn from some kind of Utopian yearning that would never mesh with the concrete ‘wants’ and ‘whys’ of the rest of society.
I see the poverty of the world stems from poverty of the mind. I see that there will never be a time when all is resolved like an alg`ebraic equation. There will always be struggle without resolve. There will be voices louder than my own shouting outrage into the whirlwind. I will always, too, not understand, and fight my own struggles, as many as are thrown at me without mercy, wonder how others have the time to do it.
I see daily the world of men, and I feel like I am not one of them though I am among them. I wonder what it is that made them that way, to assume this ‘manliness’ and tout it as superior to all else. These boasts and jostling, posturing and buried aggression. I don’t feel like I belong then even among my gender.
Nor do I feel even that I belong among my race, my species, genus or world order. There is something else unlatched from the mother spaceship of humanity that drifts e into some other orbit.
I don’t know what it is, and perhaps I will never find out. It isn’t my right or duty to find out. It is my duty to just BE.
In being there is no outside or inside. There is no rightful place. I write and conduct the order of my life out of structured consciousness that is neither inclusive or preclusive of some understanding.
I want to be like all of you, but you do not want to be like all of me. But in all of us, there is a multitude of possibilities.
There is never truly an outside. We’re all outsiders looking in to somewhere else, never feeling that we quite belong, or want to belong.
Or is there even an inside?
Paul Maher Jr. 