How I Get Over Feeling Like I Don’t 'Fit In'
A stupefyingly easy trick, coming to terms with the past, and gray days here in PNW.
It’s been gloomy and cold. Ugh.
I keep reminding myself that it’s not so far off from the June Gloom I’d been feeling in LA, but I lament the warmer breezes I’d be enjoying on an afternoon walk under such gray skies. That I’d still be going to Marina Del Rey beaches to eat a bowl of fruit after the gym, wrapped in a towel with my journal, watching the gray clouds roll over the ocean rather than the cold, unforgiving breeze outside our downtown windows. Here, I know that if I go to the beach at the Lake a few blocks away, a light towel won’t be enough. There’s a small feeling of being trapped by the cold here, that my warm-weather loving heart will always struggle with.
In that part of my heart, I feel even more as if I don’t really belong here. I chose to come. I chose to pack up my California life and return to the PNW to be with Jake. I truly thought, and still very much do, that there was some part of my past I needed to face, and heal. I’m still working out what that part might be.
In the meantime, I struggle against this chilly days not having a safe place to go.
A museum, a hotel lobby to work, drinking coffee till the cocktail crowd rolls in. Or wander through thrift stores on Melrose with my best friend. A part of my heart breaks at these thoughts. Which is when I have to implore the only way I know to cope.
It’s shockingly easy, actually. And fun. And silly. As silly as ‘trying to fit in’ is, anyway.
Growing up in this part of the country, I felt the differences between myself and my peers intensely. I spent most lunches alone in the library, I was asked to one school dance by a boy’s invitation began with ‘no one else was available so…’ Everything I wore, made, and said when I raised my hand in class was berated.
There came a point in my early teens, around sophomore year when I realized: I wouldn’t have it any other way.
From what I could tell of my little family travels, from books and movies, there was a world of weirdos just like me, waiting out there in the world.
They were in cool cafes and sleek bars in the Lower East Side, or hanging out at the beach in Venice. They were somewhere else.
And if I were to change now,
to fit in here, a small mountain town where most boys knew how to hunt by age 10, I’d never find my people.
I’d never know what it was to belong. All I had to do was be strong, and wait till it was time to leave.
I never figured out what (I’m still unpacking it and therapizing myself) but something about my differences must have been very threatening to that town. What other reason would they go to such great lengths to always remind me how unwanted I was? Why else would they work so hard to banish me and make me feel bad for them?
Instead of growing bitter, I developed what I now lovingly call an ‘alien perspective.’ I simply started to approach the whole thing - the life, the town, the school - as if I were from another planet literally, and just here visiting. Checking things out. It gave me the curiosity to observe rather than constantly chase after doing what others were doing. It gave me the courage to be different, because the fact that they didn’t understand the difference was fun and interesting now. There was a whole other world I was from and would return, after all. And sadly, that fate wasn’t so far off. Many of them stayed in this little corner of the world and never left.
So, staring out these windows and watching the trees shiver and shake at the weather despite it being May (yes! May!), I tell myself: I’m just visiting. I’m just here to watch with an open mind. And someday, a call will find me to create my place here, or return to my own home planet.
Because aren’t we all just visiting earth for a short while, in our precious and brief lives?
Don’t we all feel like the sun at times, hidden by the clouds, waiting for our turn to shine again?
