Strange

Being a stranger is a weird, almost uncomfortable concept for me. I cannot pinpoint a specific time in my life when I felt this way. That is not to say that I have never felt out of place. I have felt bizarre many times: Drama Club auditions, various social gatherings, competitions, and so on. The reason there is no pinpoint time to focus on is because I have always been a stranger. I have not always been uneasy, but I have always been on the outside. My entire conscious life has been me with dealing with the fact that I am not part of the consensus. Some of it is from unfortunate circumstances, while most of it is my own doing. The best place to start with my constant and continuous stranger-dome is where it most likely began.

I was not unique to begin with, my birth was ordinary and easy and I was born normal and healthy. My unfortunate “uniqueness” started when I began to try to communicate with others. I was far from normal in that aspect. For some unexplained reason, whenever I tried to talk, it came out a gargled mess. I was speaking a foreign language while still speaking my native tongue. The only person who could understand me was my sister, and she had to become a translator for me. I was effectively mute without my sister. I don’t know what kind of lasting psychological impacts this has had on me, all I know is that this was my first encounter with a life-long problem of trying to connect with people.

Of course, since very few people could understand me as a child, I was placed in a speech pathology course from first to fifth grade. I rather like the course. My teacher was nice and fun and I had two other people in the class to become friends with. Unfortunately, that would change too. I would once again become an outsider. In third grade, one of the other students no longer had to take the class, and in fourth grade, neither did the other. I was alone in that class. I did not feel unique and special, I felt strange and like a failure. Eventually, though, I learned to take solace in it and cherish it as an important time when I wouldn’t have to feel ashamed about my speech. Life continued to changed, though. I had to move on to sixth grade where I could no longer take the speech classes. I had to continue being a failure at the basic human skill of speaking, and I still feel to this day that I am not an ordinary English speaker, I have an accent, even within my own family, and I still often have trouble with my pronunciation.

Sixth grade was an important year, not only for my loss of speech pathology, but also for my acceptance. This deceptive writing is not meant to say that I finally felt like less of a stranger. No, I still felt uneasy every day. The uneasiness just originated from a new source. In sixth grade I learned to accept the fact that I was gay. The ramifications of this, I can still feel today. I had always known I was gay in some capacity, but sixth grade is the year I finally accepted that I wasn’t bicurious or bisexual, but gay. This was not a beautiful moment where I truly became myself, like some movies have one believe. This was shaking nervousness that terrified me. I was not like everyone else, I was further alienated from the people that I wanted nothing more than be close to. To borrow a title from author Robert A. Heinlein, I was a stranger in a strange land. I could no longer lie to myself and be what everyone thought I was.

Even though I was able to accept the fact that I was no longer like everyone else, I could not admit it to others. I was stuck in a perpetual limbo where I was an aberrant, but not one that was readily visible. I was lost in my own mind and terrorized by the thought of what people might do if they found out. This terror was short lived, though, as I quickly realized that most of the people I cared about would still care for me, whether I was gay or not. But even though the terror of repercussion subsided, I was still terrified of telling anyone, and I still am. I still have my life firmly rooted in this preconstructed closet and only a few people have glimpsed inside. And while the previous sentence may cause others to believe that I was able to overcome this terror, they were misinformed. Only one of these glimpses were truly of my choice. Most of them were of some indecipherable obligation I felt to tell those people. I am still terrified of escaping this shallow place I’ve been hiding in and the only reason I even chose to discuss it is because of this concerning obligation I feel.

And the separation doesn’t end there, nor is it my greatest separation. In high school, I started to have, what I think, are very concerning thoughts about myself. At this time of my life, I started to realize that I didn’t feel like everyone else. I wasn’t having these hills and valleys of emotions that others seemed to have. They were truly happy or genuinely sad. I’m not sure if I’ve really felt these emotions in their fullest forms. I have laughed and I have cried, but I never seemed to be happy or sad. I was simply content. I didn’t have any hills or valleys, I only had a plain. Nice for grazing, but not very life affirming. This became the most absolutely horrifying of my aberrancies. How can I truly be a person if I don’t have these emotions? Am I simply struck with an empty depression that I’m not aware of, or am I truly without these ranges of emotion?

Perhaps the most pathetic thing about it is that I now crave some sort of emotional reaction. I feel empty and the only thing I truly want is to feel something other than the emptiness. I want to be in love, I want to be happy, I even want to be depressed, because at least it is something other than the utter flatness. I feel like I’m not actually living, that I am something different from everyone else and it’s not something I enjoy. Even as I was writing this, I wished I was in such an emotionally vulnerable state that I could cry, but I am unable. This is not my emotional vulnerability, this just an expression to me.

I have always been a stranger and I probably will always be a stranger. The most telling aspect of this is that when I moved into the dorm, I felt no different than when I did at home. I believe the reason behind that is because I have lived as a stranger my entire life. Being in a strange place is nothing new to me. This disheartening truth is a constant to me. I am a stranger no matter where I go, no matter who I am with, and no matter what I am doing.