by an Outsider
I’ve never really felt like I belong in the places where I was meant to.
At school, I was there in body, but my mind was always just out of sync, as if everyone else
had received the script beforehand, and I was still trying to decipher which scene we were in.
Even when speaking to friends, I felt as though I was translating myself before speaking, tweaking my ideas to fit the space they would occupy better.
It wasn’t as if I had nothing to say. It was simply that I didn’t know where my words were permitted to go.
Writing changed that.
At first, writing didn’t seem like anything particularly powerful; it was merely words on a page, half-baked ideas, and fragments I didn’t know how to organize. I wrote because I didn’t know how not to. I put things in notebooks that I could not articulate out loud without feeling vulnerable, things that could reside in silence without disturbance.
But over time, something unusual happened; as I wrote more, I began to identify a recurring thread, not in my stories themselves, but within me. The same questions appeared again and again, the same emotions concealed in different forms, and the same longing to make sense of things I couldn’t articulate.
Writing ceased being an act of expression and became one of discovery.
There is a part of me that only appears when I write. This part is not bolder or louder, but simply more honest. It doesn’t consider anything before thinking and doesn’t need permission to occupy a space. In this world, I don’t feel like I am attempting to fit into anything; I feel as though
I am constructing something that fits me. This isn’t an ideal world; there are messy pages and abandoned ideas. Even these fragments seem to belong to something that I created rather than something in which I was placed.
I used to think belonging was about discovering a space that already existed and finding a way to insert myself without seeming to be on the outside.
Now I am learning that it might be something different entirely.
Perhaps belonging has to do with building a world so quietly that initially, only you can hear it, and discovering that this itself was sufficient to begin with.
Art by Melissa Meyer, “Thoughts (2007)“
About the Author
Author prefers to remain anonymous, who finds writing as an avenue for both expression and refuge, capturing quiet reflections on connection, distance, and the search for meaning in everyday life.