Ballad of the misfit

The year has started out marvelous and then turned into a bit of a drag recently - I’m in the middle of a big life change so naturally, my nervous system is sensitive and loneliness and every day life chores are more exhausting than usual. I decided to brave the cold (and the desire to just stay at home) and go out with one of my closest friends on Thursday. We ended up in an indoor market among spices, Italian delicatessen and fluffy pastries. It was glorious, despite my headache. On the way back to the station and having trusted our intuition to guide us through the stalls and the maze of the streets of Stuttgart, we wound up in a book store where, naturally, I walked straight up to the English section. As I browsed the paperbacks, I almost immediately picked out Jenny Mustard’s new novel What A Time To Be Alive.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Jenny is what me, a late bloomer on the platform, would call an OG YouTuber. You know, one of the ones who were there when it began (her channel was created in 2014, which, if you think about it, is really not that long ago), who were successful, who were somehow larger than life. Being a writer myself, I remember how I grinned when I chanced upon her first novel Okay Days in a local book store a few years back and thought, good for you! Someone from my niche making it in the big world out there. So when I saw her second book now, I just went with it.

I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the revelation it turned out to be. This is not a book review and I’m not going to spoil the experience for you either, but I will say that the way she described this young woman going through the motions as she is struggling with university, romance and friendships as a twenty-one year-old, I felt understood in a very rare way. Whether it was intentional or not (it’s not mentioned anywhere specifically), Jenny described what I’m assuming many neurodivergent women will be familiar with. The awkwardness of being around other people, even when you’re familiar with them and have somehow figured out how socializing works (and people actually deem you pretty good at it). The internal struggles of over and under attaching to others, overanalyzing people’s actions towards you while underestimating the need for your own boundaries. Carrying the burden of being a life-long misfit while, paradoxically, now often being seen as interesting, inspiring, socially adept.

Especially the last bit. It’s been interesting seeing this dichotomy play out in my own life. While I was away over the holidays, in a hotel by myself but also surrounded by strangers constantly, quite a few people walked up to me and started a conversation, and I, too, would sometimes initiate contact by giving up a seat at my table or simply offering to take a picture of a family, make a humorous remark or whatever came to mind. People would then often comment how outgoing, communicative and radiant I seemed to be. As if I was somehow in my natural habitat.

This is interesting because none of this came naturally to me in life. Like, at all. If you go back and watch old camera footage of myself as a child, how I engage with other people, and if you read my diaries from my childhood, you will quickly see that otherness in me that got picked on in school. I used to describe myself as a robot or an android, and it’s easy to see why. My posture was rigid, sometimes even distorted. I had a hard time easing up with people my age because I had very little in common with them and their unspoken rules were off to me. Secretly, I was envisioning a different environment for myself - a mixture of academia and the world of movies - where I believed I would fit in more. To prepare for this initiation, whenever it would happen, I practiced the poise and speech of my role models on screen while being at a loss with the habits of my peers. As Jenny’s protagonist Sickan, I am no stranger to being called ‘strange’, openly and covertly.

Many years later, and because we dedicated so much work to our social skills, both Sickan and me eventually turned our experiences of being ostracized and never really belonging into almost the opposite, at least on the surface. I could now pride myself in being able to blend in with almost any crowd if I so wished, even if that meant that I would sometimes lose myself in the process. Like Jenny’s heroine, I have often found myself waking up with anxiety in the morning because after a night out with others, I felt like I had played a role a little bit. It’s been a solid decade of trying to find a balance there, and I’ve made progress.

The interesting thing about being a misfit is that it creates a very interesting life story. When you move past adolescence (where normativity still plays much more of a role), people are often intrigued by otherness, especially if by now you’ve learned to show it in a graceful, curated version - less raw and awkward than in your teens. Many, past the age of thirty, forty, fifty, have been disillusioned by some of their own life choices and find it very fascinating to talk to someone who looks at the world differently and has seen a fair bit of trauma and magic without losing their drive. The neurodivergent woman is no longer the circus attraction she used to be, she is now the socialite that people invite over because she’s got stories to tell. And it’s nice like that, because finally she is actually part of the conversation, not just the subject. People actually do listen and she is actually allowed to contribute.

When I look back on my fantasies of being part of a secret academic society of some sorts or becoming best friends with Emma Watson as we brave the intricacies of acting life together, what was obviously behind it was the wish to belong and to be taken seriously. When your experience growing up is that the laughter in the hall might be directed towards you, you don’t take these things for granted. Like Sickan, my nervous system is still often hypervigilant, and not just because of the bullying. Not establishing boundaries for fear of being abandoned or rejected creates many vulnerabilities growing up and you learn to be on your guard while at the same time trying to tell yourself, it’s fine, it’s fine. I’m strong, I can handle anything. It’s this type of determination that helps you practice starting conversations with strangers even though you’d really rather not because you don’t know what you’re doing.

It has become easier to belong in adulthood, I will say that. Not just because there’s less tension than in school between peers, less rivalry. Or because by now, I do know what I’m doing when starting a conversation. I have also started to experience the desire to belong as less absolute, which takes the pressure off, and therefore the inevitable disappointment when, after long conversations with people that feel like bonding, they will get up and leave, returning to their life and keeping you as an inspiring memory, not as a life-long friend. (Which, in most cases, wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but when you’re young and vulnerable, you are also desperate.) And, like Sickan in the novel, I have learned to stand up for myself and gently or firmly remind people that I’m not a prop to them (sorry for the professional pun). Remind myself that true belonging happens not by seamlessly fitting into an existing situation and giving it all you’ve got and more, simply in the high hope that someone will actually see your true self through all of that.

Not too long ago, Emma Watson shared on a podcast how lost and vulnerable she was in early adulthood post the Harry Potter era, where everything had been kind of like a big family. For a long time, I had naturally assumed that she would never struggle to make real friends anywhere, with the gracefulness and openness she exuded. Turns out, she did. And I can only guess that Jenny Mustard’s intimate description of Sickan’s drift in Stockholm is at least partially based on her own experiences - it seems too authentic to be made up entirely. Some things you only know if you know.

The point is: It is precisely this life-long effort of trying to master social norms and relationships that sometimes stands in the way of us ‘others’ finding true belonging. We pride ourselves in finally being able to fit in ‘on demand’ and sometimes forget that in order to be seen for who we are, we can’t simply fulfill perceived expectations. Many of us, whether neurodivergent or not, have turned our misplacement in the world into a source of power. We have used the humiliation and confusion of being odd as fuel to make look effortless what took years of research, therapy or bravely living outside the norms. I am happy to say that life in my thirties as an outsider is a lot easier than in my twenties, and that it is not simply due ‘finally growing up’ (i.e. ‘quit pretending you’re something special’) or some bullshit like that. But I also want to clarify that by ‘easier’, I don’t mean that it ‘just works’. I mean I can now sometimes go to a restaurant with people and actually enjoy it. I no longer get panic attacks when meeting someone indoors. Most of the time. Some social norms and situations I now ‘get’ and actually like, others still stress and exhaust me, no matter what. I regularly get emotionally overwhelmed in supermarkets, for instance. Especially if they play music. I have meaningful friendships. But certainly not ‘just like that’, and my ability to socialize ‘on cue’ actually doesn’t have that much to do with it. I’m not being inauthentic for doing it - I do enjoy it these days. But like you enjoy playing a difficult piece of music on your piano with someone. You are proud of yourself for pulling it off, but there’s much more to you than that and you certainly can’t do it all day, every day.

For a while now, I have suspected that many, many people who end up in the limelight to some degree and stay there voluntarily have had similar social experiences to my own. Because if you can have all the meaningful relationships you want in your life, your desire for parasocial relations through fame and notoriety is maybe a bit more limited. The stress that being a public figure puts on you, you only continue to choose that if there is a desire that’s being fulfilled that you can’t fulfill elsewhere. To be liked from afar once you’ve mastered how to conduct yourself in public is better than the disappointment of being rejected from up close for being awkward. It’s obviously more complex than that, in my case as in that of everyone else, but there is something to it I think.

Meaningful relationships still don’t come easy to me. Just because I have learned social skills and have an online following of some sorts doesn’t mean that my body and the rest of myself have forgotten all the times when things between me and other people went wrong for one reason or the other. In order to learn to how to walk up to people and chat, or make a group laugh, or enter romantic relationships with all their subtle expectations, I also forcefully put myself in situations in the past where people were taking advantage of that vulnerability and eagerness. Which is to say, the world likes people who are outgoing and especially in the day and age of social media, it’s an asset in a way. You look like you made it, like you’re it. But it’s not always worth the price to try and become that, so don’t be fooled, especially not by me. Like Sickan, I’m proud of what I have achieved, but I’m also still bearing the scars I got along the way. And I’m glad we’re starting to talk about that more.

Now go an read Jenny’s book. It’s awesome. (I’m not being paid to say this, she doesn’t even know me.)