Calling all aliens & orphans of a crowded sky
"Normal" is boring
Dear Chosen Family,
Have you ever felt like an alien, like you didn’t belong? Today, I listened to an episode of Bewildered titled “Feeling Like an Alien.” In the episode, Martha Beck summarizes the two Oxford definitions of “community”:
The first is “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.”
The second, which to me is the more true definition, is “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.”
Growing up Out the Road in white, male-dominated Alaska to parents of bougie Californian transplants, with “Heinz 57” for ancestral identity (or, as Bayo Akomolafe describes white people, an “orphan of a crowded sky”), I checked the first definition only, sharing place with my community and little else. Lacking the “common attitudes, interests, and goals” of the people around me made me feel like a resident “alien.”
I tried to become more “normal,” but the more I tried and failed, the more I disliked myself.
“Normal is boring,” my well-meaning mother told me. “Why be normal?”
Of course, she was right. But in adolescence, conformity is belonging, and belonging is all that matters.
And yet I knew that somewhere there were other worlds, maybe a world that shared my values, where I could be the real me.
So, at sixteen, I lived a semester in Argentina, and during my freshman year of college, I traveled alone through Mexico, studying Mesoamerican mythology. I lived with Honduran Islanders and dancehall reggae artists in Jamaica. After graduating with a degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies, I moved to Costa Rica, started a business with a Venezuelan surfer, and married him, even though we didn’t check a common demographic box.
The more I found kinship in people outside of my Anglo-Alaskan-Californian-WASP culture, the more alien I felt.
I named this space The Feral Stack because I wanted to create a community of like-minded life wanderers willing to examine culture deeply, connect behaviors and values that no longer serve us, and offer up new ones that do. A community of thoughtful, open-hearted individuals who are hungry for change.
Now, I pass the talking stick to you:
Have you begun that walk toward your own truth? If so, how did that begin for you? Also, how do you coexist and belong to the larger group while still living in your individual truth? Or Is that even possible?
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