Not to sound like Jughead Jones or Radiohead, but I’ve always felt like a bit of a weirdo.  I fit the archetype like a glove, but I’ve always been just a bit hesitant to call myself “weird”.

Though I’ve often felt out of place with my books and pencil shavings, I’ve also assumed that everyone feels that way, Nobody.  After all, practically every literary protagonist is an outcast in some sort of way.  These are supposed to be the most relatable character in the story, therefore meaning that everyone (or most everyone) must feel a little like an outcast or a weirdo.  And if everyone’s weird, no one’s weird.  Ergo, though the concept might be relatable, feeling that you’re weird really isn’t all that noteworthy.  So I never really thought it worth mentioning.

But lately I’ve been trying this thing, Nobody, where I don’t devalue my feelings just because they’re not unusual.  So I thought I’d explore this topic more than I’d ever like to.

What constitutes a weirdo?  In my case, social awkwardness, annoyingly high levels of perfectionism, and an obsession with all things fictional.  Now, this is pretty standard stuff.  I’m in good company with plenty of respectable geeks and freaks.  But it didn’t feel that way growing up. 

From elementary to middle to high school, I felt notably weird.  It wasn’t just because some of my peers were kind enough to remind me of it; I sort of just knew that my interests and quirks didn’t exactly fall into the mainstream.  But like I said, I never stuck onto the moniker of “weird,” because I was certain that I wasn’t special or interesting enough to really fit it.  I was sure that, being only slightly strange, I would find plenty of other people along the way who were exactly like me somewhere along the way.  So why didn’t I?  Why did I always feel so alone?

I don’t think it’s because I’m “just too unique,” of course.  If I had to hazard a guess, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d have to say it was instead because I thought I was living in a story.  I don’t mean to say that I’m delusional (that’s another essay).  Rather, I think I just relied too heavily on fiction to make sense of reality. 

In every story I read about outcasts, they never stayed outcasts.  They change, or the world changes, but they’re always ultimately accepted.  That’s the case from Harry Potter to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  I guess I just kept waiting for that Hogwarts letter or cloudy Christmas day to come for me.  But it never did, because the real world doesn’t care about story structure.  And it certainly doesn’t think that you’re the protagonist.

I’m not suggesting that we ought to write more “realistic” stories where loners stay alone.  How boring would that be!  But I do think we ought to remember that you don’t always get inciting incidents in life.  Sometimes, you have to get the story started yourself.

We’re all weirdos, but maybe some of us are just better at it than others.  And some of us (me) have trouble getting beyond that archetype.  Some of us cling to it.

Because it’s really, really nice to believe that things will surely work out for you.  That you’ll find a world or people where you can belong without even having to try.  Stories like that are wonderful and necessary.  I know they were for me.

But, for better or worse, we’re stuck with the world that we’ve got: one that can’t be tamed by archetype.  There’s no story structure that we can rely on, and there’s no happy endings.  Or endings at all, for that matter.  The world’s big and expansive and strange and weird.  It’s the weirdest thing there is.  So maybe, Nobody, we can take some comfort in that; we’re all, without a doubt, perfectly made for this crazy place.

Talk again soon, I hope.

P.S. Letters to Nobody is going to go a bit on a hiatus. My apologies, Nobody, for my college workload.