Out of Place

If you have not yet grasped it, my biggest struggle in making my way through the world is that I feel out of place. I never quite feel like I fit in the same mold as everybody else. I had hoped this was purely a childhood thing, but I am much closer to thirty than twenty and the feeling shows no sign of abating.

I have often prayed not to "be like everybody else," but to be enough like everybody else that I can be social and able to hold a conversation, to buy a house and drive a car without perpetual fear of breakdown. To be married, have kids, buy an RV and go camping. To live into my retirement years, enjoy life, and die content.

Perhaps some of my hopes built subconsciously on this base must then be denied, because that is a tempting trap to fall in to. Comfort. Conformity for conformity's sake. To take the wide, easy road through life. I try despite noticeable obstacles to hold to the closest approximation of that life that I can, because I am afraid of what else might be out there, and because I don't really know what other course to plot.

Life in every face I see seems to be the normal pursuit of normal things, and while I have always felt like that is not for me, I all the more desperately want to hold on to it. I tell myself that I just need some things of that life to take with me - a wife for support and companionship on a lonely road, a home because it is a wise investment, a car for practical considerations. But I sometimes think that each comfort I try to take is just another strap lashing me to the ship I both want to abandon and on which I want to make my home.

Where do you go next when you only know the direction not to go?