As a child, I was once told that I ‘belonged to another time’. I didn’t quite fit, although I was not really that different from the other children in the neighborhood. I never felt ostracized or excluded; in fact I was well-liked and often sought out. I was simply different.
As I grew, I never lost that sense of difference. Regardless of where I went or who I spent time with, I always felt a lack of belonging. I wasn’t in any cliques in High School, although I was far from being a social outcast. After leaving home to pursue my independent life, I searched for that feeling of ‘home’ which was foreign to me. I never found it. Even now I still have not been in a place that feels like home, and I have been many places.
I wonder at times if perhaps my dearth of belonging simply comes from my writerliness. Each person drawn to express themselves artistically–whether with music, visual arts, dance, mathematics, creative writing, performance–has a unique view of the world, and affects and is affected by it in strikingly divergent ways. Creatives simply do not see things the way non-creatives do. We observe, process, internalize, and express absolutely everything in myriad ways. It is the way of the soul-led.
I have on occasion wondered if maybe I do ‘belong to another time’. The person who spoke those words to me when I was a child likely meant that I was a throwback to an earlier generation, but I don’t feel I am. I am comfortable in this time I inhabit.
But there is this niggling thought…
The Universe is so massive, that its scope is unimaginable for the human mind. We haven’t discovered its edges. New, mind-boggling concepts about its immensity are being found at astounding rates. Add to that theories on alternate realities and multi-verses, and the possibilities for life other than as we know it are quite literally unquantifiable to a degree we can justifiably call limitless.
In the grand opera of our universe alone, the most infinitesimal influence could send a consciousness intended for one place to somewhere so far off-course it would take a billion billion lifetimes to find it.
What if I am not a person meant for another time, but instead meant for another place?
What if I could find my home out there, in that vast, crowded emptiness?
An Insignificant Life 
For some reason, I really identify with what you’ve said here. I had a very different background, lots of friends, a huge family, and always felt I belonged and fit in – but, I felt alone and somehow different. I’ve always been okay with that for some reason, maybe because I don’t allow myself to dwell on thinking about it. If one does, it can be a lonely world – that inner place that no one else sees or even knows exists; and if they did, wouldn’t understand in the same way you do. I thought this was a very insightful, well written and expressed post.
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