I’ll be honest, I’ve had a bad week. If you dare, proceed.
This week I just feel ill at being myself because I’ve been slammed for being myself. I then noticed my self will never really fit with anyone, most likely.
I was taught all my life that nonconformity was uniquely valuable. Being outside the box, blah blah blah. So I became what I’ve become and NOW, I’m just like the underlined proper name or acronym in a Microsoft spellchecked document where I’m actually correct, but everyone can SEE that I am not like the other words. I am HIGHLIGHTED. I am standing noted where nothing can help me; a scapegoat or a protruding misfit peg to be hammered in.
I don’t look wierd anymore but somehow people know it. Maybe it’s my green contacts? Maybe I’m just in the wrong environment?
But they feel it, they smell an “otherness” on you. Weirdness is almost as hard to live out as being another color. People know. They don’t trust you.
Even before anything happens, they think you’re going to be some kind of goof off or some kind of loopy aging hippie or loose cannon who’s going to blow them up or self-destruct in their environs and make it look bad for them. They don’t really want you there, they kind of just want to squeeze all the Dark Crystal life out of you and harness it for their own needs. You, the real you, is a husk to throw away, or something they don’t want to think about.
The painful part is that it works on you all the time at other levels. You begin to worry that it’s noticeable as a bra-strap everywhere, even in places where it isn’t. You begin to erase and correct yourself constantly. And then you act strangely nervous and suddenly everyone knows, you’ve been damaged by someone in a higher power place than yourself and you’re acting like it instead of being normal. Even your good offerings are mistrusted because they sense the nervousness. There isn’t much help for you once you start doing it at this stage, it’s engraved on your soul.
I keep looking for a new kind of way to live my life that won’t end up like this — suggestions appreciated if you can work out anything beyond what I’ve arrived at…… because I don’t have any way to validate myself anymore. I don’t know how. There’s no one and nothing to do it with here. Every time in the past I tried it, I ended up being way too far off the map, even if I was happier.
That’s the saddest part: Ultimately no one understands your happiness either. They don’t understand what makes you tick at all. They have no idea what you’re talking about. This means that even if you please yourself as the person you are and are satisfied with you, you are doomed to never share it. Try to go back and assimilate into normalcy, and they will simply smell it on you like smoke.
I didn’t grow up wishing to be beyond the pale. I think if I’d been just a naiive poser, being set out here alone would have been fitting. But I truly wasn’t. I didn’t just choose this. It chose me.
In retort and some resignation, I have decided to come up with a list of people who simply couldn’t fit, and I love them for it, or in spite of it.
Joan of Arc — Of course, of course. I had to put her first.
Vincent Van Gogh — The most frustrated communicator on earth, ever, I think. And a truly pure soul.
Princess Diana — She might have been supremely normal — in any other level of society.
Oscar Wilde — For being the original hated smartass. Ok, after Socrates, maybe.
Woody Allen — Who said he’d done everything he’d ever wanted to do, but was still not happy.
Josephine Baker — You try dancing in nothing but a bunch of bananas, and telling the neighbors, yes, these two panthers really are my pets.
George Sand — Who managed to raise two children while running around in drag with Chopin and Liszt.
Morrissey — For turning whining into an artform.
Ross Perot — Terrible politics, but those colorful metaphors were so fun. He couldn’t help but mess up his image.
Leonardo da Vinci — For being ambiguous in an age far far before his time.
Robert Downey Jr. — We all have our demons, his is just being over the top — of that snowy mountain.
Ghandi — The guy who invented social guilt as a weapon, supremely knowing his own value, and everyone else’s value as well.
Tammy Faye Baker — She held up when her husband deserted her, her makeup failed and the entire planet decided she was awful.
The Marchesa Luisa Casati — She really DID just want to be art. She spent all her millions trying.
Einstein — For being my Dress-for-Success role model as well as his ability to make no one feel stupid.
Dorothy Parker — For being an acid wit.
Little Richard — For being his glittery in-your-face, gorgeously howling self.
Ellen DeGeneres — For being Out, but somehow managing to keep the world loving her. How’d she DO that?
Hide — Japanese J-Rocker who would have been iconoclastic in the US, but was a complete alien in his native Japan.
Margaret Cho — For being the first famous self-declared fag-hag, as well as the US’s first Korean commedienne.
Elizabeth I — Just consider the pressure of such a position. Consider inventing such a persona in the midst of it.
PeeWee Herman — For what can only be described as sheer PeeWee-ness.
Sylvia Plath — For being supremely aware of how human life could not please her.
Bonnie Raitt — For starting as daughter of an actor and ending as a black-blues, slide-guitar playing woman who can drink you under the table.
Steve Wozniak — The unsung nerd hero of Apple technology, who left an empire in favor of education.
Isadora Duncan — For living WAY too voraciously for her era.
Bjork — She looks like an elf, screams like a maniac, and wears dead swans to the Oscars. Fantastic!
Michael Jackson — I suspect he’s weirder than we even know, but he sure could dance.
Robin Williams — For never knowing when to stop, and living like the exuberant child we all should be.
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Wow! I suddenly don’t have an urgent need to suck on a tailpipe.