Different
I’ve often wondered what it would feel like to fit.
Not to change myself into what others expect me to be.
Not to pretend to be someone I’m not.
Truthfully, I’ve never wanted to conform. I’ve always preferred standing out. Yet somewhere deep inside me has always longed for something that feels almost contradictory.
To belong.
To walk into a room the way a well-worn shoe slips onto your foot. Comfortable. Familiar. Effortless.
Instead, I’ve spent much of my life trying on shoes that were never made for me.
I’ve always been different.
I remember galloping around the elementary school playground pretending to be a unicorn, neighing at the top of my lungs. I remember crawling out into the parking lot on all fours barking like a dog on a dare during dance class. I remember tying my friend’s long hair to the ballet barre. In high school, my creative writing teacher once declared that I was driving her to drink.
Yes, I occasionally got kicked out of class.
At the same time, I was a good student. I was in choir, on the colour guard, and part of the creative writing club. One person once described me as “a breath of fresh air.”
I’ve held onto that.
My sense of humor has always been strange. Zany. Slightly theatrical. Sometimes people laugh so hard they cry. Other times I say something that seems perfectly hilarious to me and I’m met with complete silence, as though everyone else received a script for life and mine got lost somewhere in the mail.
I also have very little filter.
Sometimes that’s delightful.
Sometimes it gets me into trouble.
As a university student in New Jersey, I climbed onto a chair in a movie theatre to flirt shamelessly with the projectionist because it seemed like the funniest idea in the world. Another time, my friends and I showed up at my manager’s house and serenaded him. We thought we were adorable. He thought otherwise.
(I was eighteen. I maintain that should count as a legal defense.)
Looking back, I laugh.
Looking back, I also recognize someone who has always experienced the world from a slightly different angle.
I’ve always attracted attention, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by existing exactly as I am.
The trouble is that being noticed isn’t the same as being understood.
I’ve loved deeply.
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I spent twenty-four years in a marriage where I often felt unseen. After my divorce, I met someone who made me believe, if only briefly, that perhaps I had finally found a person who understood me.
I was wrong.
What broke my heart wasn’t simply that my feelings weren’t returned.
It was believing, for a little while, that I had finally found someone who spoke my language, only to realize we had been having two entirely different conversations.
That loss cut more deeply than I expected.
Not because I lost a future with him.
But because it awakened an old fear I’ve carried most of my life: that perhaps I am simply too different to ever be fully understood.
Oddly enough, the creatures who have understood me best have never spoken a single word.
Animals have always found me.
Cats curl up beside me without asking me to explain myself. They don’t need me to soften my personality or rewrite my jokes. They don’t care whether I’m too emotional, too quirky, too sensitive, or too much.
They simply decide, in their mysterious feline way, that I’m safe.
Perhaps that’s why I love them so fiercely.
Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve spent my whole life searching for the kind of acceptance animals offer so effortlessly.
Not admiration.
Not attention.
Just recognition.
The quiet certainty that says,
“I know who you are, and you’re welcome here.”
I still don’t know exactly where I fit.
Some days I wonder whether there’s someone in this world made for someone like me.
But I haven’t stopped looking.
Because somewhere, I have to believe there are people who laugh before I explain the joke. People who understand my strange heart without asking me to become someone else.
Maybe belonging isn’t about finding the perfect place.
Maybe it’s about finding the few souls, human or otherwise, who make you feel as though you’ve been home all along.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
