Exile

I think I’ve lived my whole life in a kind of exile.

Not from a place, but from belonging.

Not my family.
Not a friends group.
Not a political affiliation.
Not a religion.
Not even a demographic, whatever that is.

Just exile.

I didn’t fit.
I don’t fit.
And now, I don’t even want to.

I’m actually happy in my self-imposed solitude. It doesn’t make me unhappy at all. If anything, it feels like I somehow escaped something. Like I slipped out of a kind of social madness I never really understood.

When I was younger, the loneliness was brutal.

I used to lie in bed at night and think:

“I am totally alone in this world, totally.”

And I’d cry myself to sleep.

It didn’t matter if I was around people. Sometimes that made it worse. I was just as disconnected in a room full of people as I was sitting alone in my apartment, maybe more so.

People felt alien to me.

Not in what they said. I could understand the words just fine.

But what they meant? What was behind them?

I didn’t know. I still don’t.

What confused me most was how okay everyone seemed with their lives.

I knew I wasn’t okay with mine.

I had to work a job I didn’t care about just to pay the bills. There was no pretending about that. It felt obvious. Like something was off at the foundation.

But everyone else seemed to move through it without questioning it too much. Or maybe they just got used to it. I couldn’t.

At work, there were these unspoken rules.

You should look happy.
You should act like everything is fine.
You should be friendly, even when you’re not.

Being real felt like a problem. Like something you had to manage.

So I learned to fake it.

Or I withdrew.

Those were the two options.

If someone insulted me, even slightly, it would wreck me.

I’d either react or disappear.

There wasn’t much in between.

It took years to see that what I was reacting to wasn’t really about them. It was something already in me, something that got triggered and ran its course.

Back then, though, it just felt like pain.

Constant, sharp, immediate.

I used to think something was wrong with me.

Now it feels more like I was built in a way that didn’t lock into the usual patterns.

Not better. Not worse.

Just incompatible with certain things.

These days, I don’t feel that same kind of loneliness.

The absence of connection doesn’t register the same way anymore.

If anything, there’s a kind of quiet in it.

No need to belong.
No need to be understood.

Just space.