Since my memory began recording, I feel like an outsider, a foreign with no homeland, a stranger to my own kind. It is mostly when I interact with my supposedly fellow creatures that I feel alien. Many of my adult efforts have been directed towards integration, but as much as I try to look like them, I never seem to manage. No matter how hard I try, I can never feel like part of the tribe.
Some people, actually just family, make me feel loved and somehow at ease, but in the back of their heads they know that I am not one of them. They are just too kind to show that they know as well as I do that I simply don’t belong.
With people outside the family, it’s sometimes easier. When I’m fit, I’m quite successful at mimicking their behaviors and expressions, but I haven’t always been good at it. For the first three decades of life, I was a terrible pretender. However, since the dumpster cleanings began, some good work has been done, and F can now look quite like others. Still it is not always easy. Some days, the dark shadowy ones, she has to make a big effort to keep up, but thanks to her new set of skills (awareness and equanimity, white belt) it is not as difficult as it once was.
Sometimes she wonders how people would react if they were aware of the lie that she was feeding them in order to fit in. Probably anger, sadness, or any other type of rejection would pop up. F’s mind still builds occasional narratives about how she doesn’t care about rejection, as if her unconscious mind wouldn’t be built upon the fear of abandonment that lies at its root. She tries to fit in, because she is scared of being abandoned, because abandonment means death, and as much as she likes telling herself that she has no fear of death, the truth is that as long as we strive to survive, being afraid of death will be the invisible engine driving our existence and keeping us alive.
UPDATE
It is now summer of 2023, which makes the previous text approximately one year old. Rereading it was like watching the prison where I used to live. A year is not long and it still feels so far away. I didn’t feel like I belonged, so I searched around and tried to extract that feeling from other people, but it wasn’t a feeling I was longing for, it was an experiential truth that I was yet to get to. “Feeling of belonging” is an imprecise expression that aspires to grasp the meaning of unity. And as much as that unity is still a way to go, it is now the way F is on. She is not an outsider, she had just never been inside. She doesn’t need to try to be like others, she needs to keep on learning how to be within herself.
NOTA MENTAL
The dumpster cleanings have a direct positive influence on the way towards unity.
Keep up the good work.
Clean, clean, clean.
