People Are Strange When You’re A Stranger.

People Are Strange.

When you’re a weird kid, a stranger, an oddity, it’s weird to exist. It’s like everything you do is on display. It can be very uncomfortable.  But you get used to it. Being isolated isn’t so bad, after a while. Personally, I got used to my group. I got used to being snickered at. I got used to not speaking up. It didn’t bother me, until,  in one of a thousand isolated moments, someone would break through. A look, or a sentence, something stabs through the nice little sheild of isolation I built for myself. Then I felt it all. I could feel people not treating me like a person.I felt the hundreds of kids, adults, everyone, closing in, staring at me, laughing at me,  ridiculing me. Suddenly, I’d feel it all at once. And then it would start to fade. But it never really disappeared. I forgot the specifics. The person, the time, the place. The remark, the look, the shove. But it’s much harder to forget the thoughts that that thing, whatever it was, provoked. The feelings of worthlessness, of inferiority, of humiliation. Those tend to linger.

I’m glad I’m out of that space now. I’m in a place where i feel relatively comfortable. I’m not so isolated anymore. And although I’m probably still considered weird, I’m definitely not the weirdest. There’s no ridicule anymore, nobody trying to squash out my self-esteem. People aren’t trying to make me feel inferior, or trying to humiliate me. So, I should be fine. But, as I said, those feelings don’t just go away.