Fringe People

If you look hard enough, you are not that different from everyone else…

Perfect description, you find yourself in a group, laughing, drinking, smirking, then zoning out. As though you were watching from the window with a wistfulness that leaves you in awe of what it feels like to fully belong. Being both an observer and a participant.

Another description is how easy it is to see all the other ways everyone is a misfit and, in some way, makes you belong. It is interesting because being able to see this means that you are not as special and unique as you think. Someone like you somewhere feels like they do not fit in, stands awkwardly wondering about meeting their own kind of people, wondering about meeting you.

The other part is how you meet people like you and you wonder how they can be so similar yet different. How they like the things you like but not for the reasons you like them or more than the reasons you like them.

When she met him, she wondered about him; his taste in fashion was nonexistent, and he didn’t listen to regular songs or value the things common people did for fun. He stuck out like a sore thumb, so he wasn’t so hard to notice,, but what struck her the most was how he was kind of weird. He had a thing for books and spoke the same language as her even though in different tongues. It felt like meeting herself only differently.

Anita is seated by the window at the party wondering why everyone seemed so vested in the boring game, she’d rather be culled up with a book by the fireplace and just silence all the noise by zoning out, that was until she looked across the room and saw someone with the exact facial compare as herself, she knows that look, she thinks to herself, it was the same one she had on her face that often preceded a plan to escape from wherever she was to anywhere else. It was at this moment she knew she was not as alone as she had thought. So she raises her glass to a kindred spirit.

It was funny that they found the same things funny but nothing else was more cringe than the fact that they could complete each other’s statement. She looks at him and thinks this must be what a soulmate feels like. Just being able to know without even speaking out loud what the other is feeling. Feeling seen even when you hide or try to, knowing that it is okay to show all the parts that you typically hide away.

Later she finds that what she called soulmate was simply a safe place where it was okay to be all of you and do you know how she knew? she found it with someone else again and again and again, hold up, how many soul mates exists in a lifetime?

In the quest to establish our uniqueness and eccentricities, we think we are special, that we think and act the way we do because there is a rebel in us that exempts us from the line of doom that is humanity. We buy so much into our uniqueness that we convince ourselves that our life is the most complicated, or that our patterns are the most curated. We simply miss out on the fact that this thought is the most common expression of humanity.

It is the foundation for heroism and villainess. It is why we can justify the most atrocious activities or perform wonder. It is simply human to seek exclusion even in inclusion, the quest to stray outside the rules, to rebel, to break monotony, to just act out. If you don’t believe me, simply study a toddler.

The most intriguing thing about being an outsider is that you need two doors. One, self-recognition that you do not belong to an existing space or confined identity, and two, the acceptance of other outsiders like you who do not fit. You may want to argue this, and I understand why because the perfect idea of an outsider would be one without a community or a point of origin, preferably a lone wolf, as that would show certain esoteric qualities, but you miss the point. There is always an evolutionary point of origin, again, this is human.

What does this post seek to do? Good question, to challenge our uniqueness in a way that unites us, to seek acceptance that our uniqueness is only as different as we perceive it or it is perceived, but more often than not, it may just be missing the right viewpoint. Just because you are misunderstood in a space does not confer upon you the title misfit.

Maybe I will tackle the concept of being a misfit illusory in my next post, or maybe not. It is enough today to remember that you are not as different as you think; maybe the entire point of your uniqueness is to show how else to be different, but to do this with other people who just as well have as many colors as you do. I think it is humbling to remember that everyone is just as special as you are, as precious, and as deserving no matter where they are from, what they look like, act like love, or hate. In the end, we are humans.

Stay cozy,

dcconnoisseur.