You know it to be true

Sometimes I feel like a foreigner in my own mind, or like my mind is the foreing place in and of itself. I often feel lost. Everyone else instinctively knows what is expected of them, how to feel and how to react. It’s as if they have a knack for life that some of us will never master. Do you know how often I find myself apologising for something, not knowing what exactly I’m apologising for? The closest thing to an answer that I’ve been able to come up with, is that I’m apologising for my existence.

Feeling. This is a word I have trouble with. “How are you feeling?” I almost always reply with, “Fine.” That’s another word that means nothing. I use that instead of trying to figure out an acceptable answer to a question that seems so simple. Luke Skywalker’s father said, “Search your feelings. You know it to be true.” I don’t think he saw the world the way I do. I do not know which of my feelings or assumptions or interpretations or whatever they are, are true. I always seem to misinterpret or misunderstand (if I understand at all) what seems to come so naturally to others.

“You’re so weird! Why do you talk like that?” “Can’t you just be normal?” Have you ever heard that before? People love making us feel like there is something wrong with us when we don’t act or react like they expect us to, when we respond in a way that seems out of the ordinary to them, when we don’t feel what they feel. I don’t feel sad when the cartoon deer “dies”. I simply think that it is a catalyst for the next series of events. I do not cry when someone else’s grandmother (whom I did not know) dies. I know I’m supposed to sympathise with them, but I don’t really know how. “What’s wrong with her?” they’ll whisper to one another. “Ugh, she acts so strange,” they’ll say just loud enough for us to hear. I feel many things when I hear news that others may perceive as bad. I may feel (or is it think?) that the deceased is freed from their suffering. Is logical thought a good substitute for feeling what others feel? 

People love saying we have to be ourselves, but that’s only true if we act like everyone else. Just because I try to ignore your mean words and pointing fingers, doesn’t mean what you say doesn’t hurt. That’s a feeling, right? I apologised for who I am so frequently, that I ended up trying to stop being myself so much that I lost all sense of who I was. Why must I be someone else? To make you feel better? To make myself feel worse? I pretend that it doesn’t bother me. They may think that I feel nothing, because my face does not give me away, but I feel like they do not understand, that I do not belong.

I have found a way to make myself and myself more palatable to others. I seem to have figured out a way to simply copy what those around me say or do. I’m smart enough and my reactions generally don’t lag, so end up mimicking what they perceive to be acceptable. That way I can tell them that I feel a certain way, fooling them into thinking that I’m one of them. It’s like a parrot that simply repeats what it hears often enough - I make the faces and the sounds that they seem to expect, camouflaging my feelings.

It’s like I have no instinct for what is right or acceptable when it comes to interacting with people. When I voice my true opinions or share my thoughts without applying whatever filter seems to be missing from my mind most of the time, people give me the strangest looks. A quick patch if I let my guard down, is to simply add, “Just kidding,” to the end of my sentences when I see that what I have said makes them uncomfortable.

I feel like my mind is a haberdasher’s playground at times; the problem is that the stitches neither match nor hold. The seams and patterns don’t line up, but they do appear quite interesting if you look at them from the right angle. The problem is that people on the outside, those who learned to flawlessly sew running and blanket stitches. As far as I’m concerned, that is a skill that can only be copied, instead of understood, so that’s what I do. I say what they expect others to say. I rephrase and repeat what I’ve heard. I smile and laugh at their jokes, even when I think they aren’t funny. I nod along in conversations, even when I disagree. When asked how I feel, I look at the reaction of the majority and mutter one of the rehearsed answers from my repertoire. 

Once I got the hang of how to react, people started calling me strange less and less frequently. I have found that they call me calm or composed. I am neither of those things - I just hide what I actually feel better than they understand. What I can’t tell them is that I feel like a stranger being held hostage in my own mind, knowing that I should not be bothered by most of the things that actually bother me, but being unable to do anything about it, except keep quiet. What I can’t tell them is that there are so many thoughts rushing around in my head that I have no idea what to pay attention to, because every single racing idea seems to demand all of my attention all of the time. 

I tell them I feel fine, because trying to explain what I actually feel, would be like explaining how to build the rollercoaster while you are riding on that self same rollercoaster. There is so much going on simultaneously, that I am unable to isolate any single thing that I feel at any given time. Even if I could determine what exactly the best way was to describe how I feel, I would agonise over the choice of words and whether they accurately convey what I actually feel. The word “chaotic” comes to mind, but so does “jumbled” and “overwhelmed” and “complicated” and a million other things that just don’t quite cover it all. That’s why I say, “Fine,” when asked how I feel. 

Search your feelings. You know it to be true. Do I? It really doesn’t feel like the truth. It feels like I am always hiding something, not telling them enough, not expressing myself well enough… like I’m not enough. I feel like I should make my peace with always being a foreigner, who will never truly know what is true.