I have been thinking about my own strangeness lately.

It’s funny how I have been called weird my whoile life and learned to accept and even embrace the label without ever really wondering what, exactly, it means.

For me specifically, that is. Everyone knows what it means in general.

Now that I am thinking about it, I can feel my own strangeness as an element of my psyche. It’s a cold, blank feeling. Like something is supposed to be there but instead there is just a sign that says “404, normal human emotions not found. ”

Alienation would be a good term for it. But it is neither something entirely about my being alienated from the population nor is it all about them alienating me.

It’s about both. And then some.

How many times have I talked about the terrible gap that opens between me and other people when I say something that seems normal to me but is beyond bizarre to them?

And what do I describe them doing? Looking at me like I was an alien.

And it’s more than mere eccentricity. People can handle that. They just mentally label you as weird and move on.

No, I say things that crash their minds. Things that come from somewhere so outside their frame of reference that I might as well be an actual alien and they literally have no idea what to say to what I just said.

Actually, if I was a literal alien, they would probably handle it better because then they would have some kind of warning. Of course an alien is going to say some really weird shit that you don’t underdstand.

It’s an alien! What did you expect?

Makes me want to get a pair of these and see if it improves my social standing.

Okay, maybe not.

But I have been thinking about social presentation lately, and how to give people some kind of idea what they are dealing with when they first meet me.

My deafualt mode is to remain somewhat inscrutable, underneath the charm and the openness and such. I love to keep people guessing.

It’s an extension of the ferocious individuality I have discussed previously. I don’t want to be labeled by people. I don’t want to be reduce to a category or a type. I want to be taken as myself, a unique individual, at all times.

SO I instinctivelt defy categorization.

And that sounds good and is totally in keepoing with the the founding principles of our modern, democratic, individualist societies.

But it’s actually myopoic and self-destructive and just plain wrong. Horribly wrong.

Because those labels exist for a reason. They are not meant to, as my fucked up mind would tell me, smother my individuality under a blanket of herdlike groupthink. ^[1]

No, the labels give people somewhere to start when getting to know you. They take you from being a total stranger to someone they at least know a few things about. This gets them past the inherent fear of strangers that society works so hard to suppress and conceal. It establishes a connection. People can add you to their filing system.

Looking at it that way makes me think back to all the times in my life when someone has been asking questions that are clearly meant to help them get to know me but I smugly remained blankly enigmatic instead, treating it like a game.

It makes me cringe. So god damned WRONG.

And the truly shudder-inducing thing is that, in my mind, this made me a fascinating person whom people would love to get to know better so they can find out who I really am and what makes me so…. different.

Um, NO. If people can’t fit you into the categories in their minds, they push you OUT of their minds and go look for a normal person who makes sense to them, like a square peg falling out of a square hole because it just doesn’t fit in.

And because this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, they will find the whole experience disturbing and will want to forget all about it as soon as possible.

So I can sit around and bitch about how isolated I am and how poor little tragic me has been left all alone in the cold cruel world, but the truth is that when people do try to get to know me, I treat it like a game and shut them down most cruelly.

It’s cruel because I don’t just tell them to fuck off or otherwise give them a clear signal of my boundaries. Instead, I play the disengenuous ghost, like I have so often done.

What do you mean, you find me weird? But I am being friendly, engaged, interested, and open. What’s so weird about that?

For fannish reference, see Garak from Deep Space Nine. He and I have a lot more in common than a naked lust for Doctor Bashir.

Those eyes…. so dreamy….

Even when I am, by sheer luck, managing not to say anything that breaks people’s brains or breaking some social rule that people weren’t even aware of till I broke it, I think people sense a wrongness in me.

It is a low level version of the same strangeness people feel around people further along the autism spectrum. It engenders the same sort of fear that insanity does. The feeling that this person is dangerous because they are unpredictable and might do anything at any time.

In essence, it breaks through the siren song of civilization and awakens that fear of strangers I mentioned earlier. Most people have no idea this song is even playing and we do not have a word for what it is or what it suppresses.

So people reject us weirdos without even understanding why. That’s why they can’t explain what the strange person is doing or has done wrong.

They don’t know themselves. It’s purely emotional. But very hard to ignore.

And the worst part of it is that the lines we cross are completely invisible to us. Therefore even with the best of intentions, we can’t help pissing people off.

To them, we are like highly excitable large dogs who might suddenly knock over the furniture or bowl them over or even thoughtlessly savage them, all the while wagging our tails, oblivious.

You might love the heck out of that dog. And it can truthfully be said that the dog intends no harm and is not trying to hurt anybody. The dog, in that sense, is innocent.

But you would be forgiven for maybe not wanting that dog around, nonetheless.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.