It is weird to be almost out of place where I never really felt in place in the first place. the sheer mass of the people here and the sheer plainness and consistency of thought have always made me feel like an outsider and have made me prefer the outside.
I often wonder about my choice to come to school here. I always knew how it would be, because I went to efy and I pretended and suffocated and I went to high school and my seminary class was all friends with each other but not me. And I knew college would be somewhere in the middle of that, between pretending and out. I guess the decision revolved around what kind of exclusion was I more interested in? The kind that dominated my high school years with my friends partying and living lifestyles that were completely unparallel to mine, but friends that I could carry on meaningful conversations with about religion and law and music and relationships? Or the kind of exclusion where people carried a cookie cutter, semi-intolerant state of mind, and who were unprepared and unrequired to think on their own. The kind that may eventually lead me to hate myself and my background, the kind where I am living in fear waking up on any given day with a mind wiped free of judgment and personality and I have become the people who write obnoxious reviews in the artists’ book at a non-conservative art show displayed on campus. But on some level the biggest decisions we make, we don’t even make, they just happen. And the biggest decision ends up being how we respond to what “just happens.”
But I am almost through now, and here I am on my way out of a place I was always out of. I’m juggling between feelings of relief and guilt and excitement, but I can’t help and look back at my experience and progression. I’m still very much the same skeptic who came here in the first place, but maybe now I’m starting to know why.
But on the line of being out of place, it seems like the key is just finding your place, no matter how small or how frequent, is to find that place and those people that have reciprocal meaning. And that’s all it takes in any city in any school in any whatever—just finding where you fit into the puzzle. And even if it’s on the outside, it feels good to just fit.
