outsider-ness and owning it

How odd it is to be so abnormal. I never fit the mold as a girl, and that was fine. Well, maybe not. Maybe sometimes, in some ways, freeing and lightening and enlightening. And at other times, lonely. (Thank you, I am so insightful.

As an adult, it’s different. I think I hide it more, lately. Scott has no shame announcing the things that make us different. I don’t really bring it up, and certainly not as directly as he does, but both of us feel made different by our outsider-ness.

Most of the time, it doesn’t really bother me in some profoundly troubling way. It just gets old, this feeling of marginal isolation.

But I think that’s kind of what this life is all about — there just aren’t going to be that many people that thoroughly get you. And so you reach to God, who does. Who gets you — gets you more intricately, more broadly, more vastly than we could begin to grasp ourselves. And the best part about Him is, you get these glimpses in your relationship with him, these glimpses that say, “You are marvelous just by being who you are.” And something in it moves you to greater yearnings to please him, to be close to him. And in the process, you have greater faith that maybe he’s not exaggerating. Maybe he knows something about you that you don’t yet. And that’s when you learn that faith isn’t one-sided. He has every bit as much in you as you do in him — and infinitely more.

Anyway, yes. I’m an outsider. Yes. I think differently. I think about odd things in odd ways making odd connections and the older I get, the more I realize that …I’m just not coming at history, religion, food, parenting, western lifestyles, health and medicine… okay, ANYTHING the way [most] people do.

Fine. I own it. You know what bugs me? (And this is totally more fitting for another entry another day… which we’ll see if I really end up doing) I think about things that other people take for granted. I research. Endlessly. I weighing options; I deliberate; I often finding real people with real experiences that I can learn from. I am not just hitting Google’s “I feel lucky today” button and letting it philosophize for me.

(And now Scott is home. This was thrown together in all of 7 minutes so I’m sorry I didn’t really clean it up.)