Ever feel like...
"I don't belong"
?
Recently, I read an AMAZING book: Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. (If you haven't read it, you need to!) While there are so many quotables from that book, the one that stuck out to me most was:
"That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don't ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you're willing to share.
I was everywhere with everybody, & at the same time I was all by myself."
I read that and immediately thought "Damn that's me."
I've felt like an outsider in most of my adult life. I had mental health issues so I was all over the place with attending college which led me to go to 4 different schools. One can imagine that isn't the best way to make friends and establish relationships. However, I am quite the extrovert when I want to be and was able to make a lot of friends everywhere I went.
So, yes, I did make friends, but it was always pretty surface. Or we just had something in common at that time that kept us together, but once that commonality was gone, the relationship basically was also. When you're jumping from school to school and walking into already established friend groups, it's not that easy to cement yourself. Plus I had a home base. I had my group of friends that I was comfortable with, that knew me, that I opened up all of the way with. They understood me. They were my people. I thought.
Obviously, this is where we take a turn into the part where I'm not very close with most of those people anymore. One of my old friends said that you don't make lifetime friends in high school. I didn't understand that at all. Why not? I have best friends still from 1st grade. Why not high school? Well shit maybe she was right lol. Now here we are in this post university world and, while I still hang with college friends occasionally, I wonder how things may have gone if I'd really tried. If instead of only giving them a part of me, I'd put it all in. Then I go back to the fact that the people I did that with left so maybe all of me is a bit too much.
You never realize how lonely being surrounded by people that don't know you is until you're standing there with a smile on your face, but all you want to do is cry.
But you can't cry.
Because they saw you cry.
And then you never saw them again.
