Too Strange for Life

When you look at life — and everything in it — you generally discover that there is something you could describe as typical, along with a few things that fall outside the borders of that typical.

The thing we often forget — perhaps because society is very busy giving everything labels — is that just because something is not typical does not mean that it is defective, or has an illness of some sort.

Let me offer a simple example. Somebody who is 2 meters tall (that's about 6 ft 7 in) is definitely not typical on planet Earth but the fact that they are so tall does not make them defective or ill, it simply makes them a little different, or in the eyes of some people a little strange.

Now, we can also apply this to things like personality, and the general psychology of the human experience. Some people are extremely extroverted and some people are extremely introverted. Some people have the same hobbies as pretty much everybody else while other people are interested in things that perhaps are only being studied by five other individuals on the entire planet!

When I was a little kid, it did not take me long to recognize that I was not exactly like most people around me.

I looked pretty normal (although I was kind of tall for my age) but one of the things that confounded teachers at my school — and subsequently school psychologists — was the strange fact that on one hand I was extremely intelligent and in the top 1%, while on the other hand I was also extremely slow to process anything and probably fit in the bottom 10% in terms of processing speed.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this, but the resulting feeling I ended up with was that I was basically too strange for this life.

In retrospect, it was simply a case of my not fitting into any of the world's neatly pre-defined little "boxes."

Of course, one of the magical things about the human experience is that most human beings are extremely adaptable, and able to put on a mask of normalcy, in service of fitting in to situations that don't feel natural at all.

But what happens to people who are exposed to long periods of feeling like they don't really fit the scenarios that are expected of them... is that what seems like the most natural course is to self-isolate and just do your own thing away from the prying eyes and opinions that what you're doing is "wrong."

I'm not suggesting that is a healthy psychological response, just that it is one that many employ as a means to navigate a life that feels like a bad fit.

I got poor marks in mathematics because even though I always had the correct answers to problems, I was completely incapable of "showing my work," and to the extent that I could show my work, it was not the "officially accepted" approach.

And, try as I might, I never could make sense of that official way of doing things.

And pretending would have been lying, so I didn't.

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful rest of your week!

How about YOU? Have you felt like you are too weird for normal life? Have you had to "mask" to get along? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2026.07.16 01:11PDT
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