Most people, at some point in their life, ask themselves “Who am I?”
But I am pretty sure most people never ask themselves “What am I?”
Just me and all the other aliens, I guess.
It sounds ridiculous but it’s true :feeling like an alien is (brace yourselves) due to alienation. I have never truly fit in anywhere. The closest I come is with groups of friends, and while that is beyond wonderful, there is still a part of me that feels like I am not part of a whole but merely visiting from another planet.
It would explain a lot.
And so, many times in my life, I have asked myself what the hell I am. What kind of creature am I? What’s my natural habitat? Is there someplace that could feel like home? Are there others of my kind?
So far, the answers are
- Strange, possibly unique
- Not sure, quite possibly academia or entertainment
- If there is, I will probably have to invent it myself
- Not so far, but there are plenty of compatible species
I’ve never gone so far as to actually wonder if I am an alien. That’s too obviously absurd. Science and logic clearly indicate that I am a human being born of human parents right here on Earth.
But I totally grok why some people would think so. It is less painful to think yourself an alien than to think of yourself as a human being who is fundamentally broken in a way that makes you seem like an alien.
In fact, belieiving yourself to be an alien turns being unique into something that makes you special and not just lonely. Often these functional delusions also come with a sense of mission or purpose, and of being part of a higher community in which the individual is valued and appreciated.
It functions a lot like a religion.
Anyhow, back to me. I am getting better at this returning to the topic thing.
The question of “What am I?” is a very personal one to me. I have never met someone quite like me. Like I implies with my species analogy. I have met people with whom I am fairly sympatico. My fellow nerds, for instance. They are my tribe.
But not all of them. Just the ones with lively, active, creative minds. The ones I think of as true intellectuals.
The kind that are curious about everything, and like viewing things from different angles, and are capable of truly considering ideas for their merit instead of just deploying talking points like a squid suirting its ink.
I have nothing against other kinds of nerds. And all nerds are my people.
But it’s the lively ones with whom I feel a connection. The ones who really think about things. People who are intelligent and articulate and interested in how things work.
People like me, in other words. Big surprise there.
And most importantly, people who will understand me when I talk. Words cannot contain the degree to which that is important to me. I spent a lot of formative years dealing with people who looked at me like I was an alien for saying things which seemed perfectly natural and normal to me.
Presumably, a lot of that is due to the fact that I grew up in such an intellectual home. My family didn’t look at me like I was an alien when I talked like that.
They got a little annoyed with what they called my professorial tone, but they didn’t look at me like I had started speaking moon language.
You know, it just occurred to me. Of course I had a “professorial tone”. After all, that was how they talked to me.
Well, that plus apparently having inherited my mother’s didactic impulse along with her big pores and shy personality.
Regardless, it’s pretty clear to me now that some of my social issues came from growing up in a highly unusual household.
But not all of them, because my siblings all grew up in the same household and all of them are way more functional than I am.
Then again, as far as I know, they weren’t raped at the age of four.
Regardless of the reason, I ended up being a much odder duck than the other three. While they had good friends, I either had no friends or bad friends. While they had a sense of life momentum (especially my sisters), I drifted through life like a ghost. They were strong and vital and connected. I was weak and sickly and rejected.
And the sad truth is, nobody knew. Because nobody cared to know. It’s funny that I have abandonment issues out the wazoo because in most ways the abandonment actually happened to me.
I know I talk about that a lot. But I have a lot of deep dank coldness from all that isolation running in seams like permafrost in my soul, and talking about it melts them a little and it is by such small victories that my sanity is repaired.
Because I am not crazy. That’s not who I am. I am a perfectly sane and function human being who happens to have suffered through a long bout of being crazy, and I am recovering from that as we speak.
And the biggest part of that is this blog. I thank you most profoundly for reading it.
If nobody read it, I wouldn’t do it. I could never do all this writing if I thought that all I was doing was putting messages in bottles and releasing them into an obscure inlet and thence into a vast and uncaring sea.
I like it when I get to use words like “thence”.
Like I said to one of my VFS teachers once, I have a powerful need to communicate. If nobody read this thing, I would not be communicating a damned thing.
So thank you from the bottom of my heart, patient readers.
By reading this, you are helping me to become whole.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.