The Gap

Have you ever been somewhere you just don't fit?  Maybe it used to be a place that made sense for you or maybe you used to be different.  Now, though, just the thought of having to be there makes you uneasy.

I have one of those places, and the dread of encountering it on a regular basis gets worse as time goes by.

When I'm at work or when I'm with my friends, I'm comfortable.  I feel like the people I am around know me on at least some type of basic functional level.  I am an individual with some sort of value.  Maybe they love me.  Maybe they hate my guts.  Whatever it is, they are basing those decisions on current knowledge of me as a person, not the offspring of so-and-so, not the assumption that all people everywhere do the same things in the same ways.

When I'm at this other place, I feel like people neither know who I really am nor very much care.  They know I'm not like them, and that's good enough.  I haven't followed the paths they have.  For a lot of reasons, I have wound up doing some fundamentally different things from most of them.   I didn't go to school here.  I don't work around here.  I am not married.  I'm not dating.  I don't have small children.  I like to travel mostly alone to places most of them consider bizarre, and I would love to live in most of those places as well.  I'm not passing any kind of value judgement here, that my way or their way is better.  I'm just saying they're not the same, and it causes problems.  Sometimes, I think maybe they might not know what to say to me.  And I suppose that's fair enough, since mostly I can say that's true from my side, too.  There is no commonality, and they're content to watch me from the corners of their eyes.

For my part, I endure and run.

It's all well and good to say, "Well, if it makes you that uncomfortable, why don't you stop going there?"  Reality tends to be a great deal less clear-cut and precise.  There are ties that bind, ties that become bonds in the strongest sense of that word.  I don't know how to get out of them.  I just know that every time I am there, I want to be away a little more and a little faster.