"How do you handle being a dissenter when everyone around you seems like they are taking crazy pills?"
Shall I tell you.... the story of my life?
Nah, TLDR.
Suffice it to say that owing to whichever set of circumstances you'd care to assign as the cause, I've found myself outside the loop of one form of groupthink after another since earliest childhood, including within my own immediate family and household, way, way, WAY more often than I've ever known what it feels like to 'belong', and even when I thought I did, I knew somewhere deep inside my secret soul that.... I really didn't. Eventually, time after time, this inner self-knowledge (that I never asked for and have spent a lifetime figuring out how to live with) has grown so turbulent within me that the only relief for it has become to flee from my latest surroundings, and set out in the blind uninformed hope that somewhere, somehow, I'll be able to get away with being who I am.
What I live with has been called anything from a bad attitude or a refusal to grow up, to various personality disorders and even just cause for outright rejection and abandonment. My infractions had never amounted to my having done any actual harm to anyone; they simply have proven, again and again, apparently impossible to coexist with.
The only lasting relief for knowing just how inevitable it is, that like clockwork, I'll find myself comprehensively incompatible with the company of others when trying to live on their terms in order not to disturb their equilibrium at the cost of my own is...... not to try to any more.
But the key to this has ultimately proven to be not to hold it against them. (Or, God help me, at least try not to...)
People are who they are. A lesson I've found the hardest to let sink in is that it may be MY opinion that others are indoctrinated or even enslaved by means of the ways they agree to think, speak, act and live, but this isn't going to turn out to be how they view themselves, and they may actually be onto something. Just as I have my reasons for being 'different' and not being willing to subject myself to what feels to me like moral lobotomy in order not to create disturbance, others tend to have their own reasons for just going ahead and fitting in, and not really minding whatever this may cost them because, in their own assessments, the benefits have been worth the costs.
I just seek out and respond to different benefits than they do. It isn't anyone else's 'fault' that what moves them to act as they do is utterly alien and without value to me, nor is it really mine either.
I am who I am too.
So now in my early sixties, I've spent the bulk of the past quarter-century living alone, and loving it. For the past nine years, this has been under my very own(ed) roof, in my beloved little 1965 single-wide that nobody else wanted and that I've made into a right fine little homestead.
Yes, this has cost me the company and even the presence in my life at all of two very wonderful children, each of whom has gone on and grown up without their dad or even knowing each other (two different moms who hate each other more than both hate me put together); it has cost me ever having known what it means to have a real 'career' (which, as a verb, means to spin wildly out of control in rapid descent, a definition aligning much closer to my own experiences of devoting myself to employers and clientele, than the noun ever has), or any fiscal assets worth mentioning, or any sense that even my own family really ever wanted much to do with me if I wasn't planning to leave soon before things turn unpleasant between us.
Three words: SO BE IT.
Not out of spite or even out of resignation, just simple acceptance. I was going to lose all those things and people anyway, or never have them to lose in the first place because, may God forgive me, I'm not at all sure I ever wanted any of them enough to do what it took to have and keep them.
Does this make me a bad person? Those who have decided this in the affirmative about me have this to live with in themselves, and I don't envy them. Having tried to out-judge and out-prosecute others into taking me as I am all my life, I know full well what a burden it is to hold another in such contempt.
So I decided not to any more, and just be what I am. Let them judge me, I don't mind, other than, I hope this doesn't cause them as much harm as my having judged them has caused me. Some will anyway, and this is just no longer any priority for me.
"How do you handle being a dissenter when everyone around you seems like they are taking crazy pills?"
Shall I tell you.... the story of my life?
Nah, TLDR.
Suffice it to say that owing to whichever set of circumstances you'd care to assign as the cause, I've found myself outside the loop of one form of groupthink after another since earliest childhood, including within my own immediate family and household, way, way, WAY more often than I've ever known what it feels like to 'belong', and even when I thought I did, I knew somewhere deep inside my secret soul that.... I really didn't. Eventually, time after time, this inner self-knowledge (that I never asked for and have spent a lifetime figuring out how to live with) has grown so turbulent within me that the only relief for it has become to flee from my latest surroundings, and set out in the blind uninformed hope that somewhere, somehow, I'll be able to get away with being who I am.
What I live with has been called anything from a bad attitude or a refusal to grow up, to various personality disorders and even just cause for outright rejection and abandonment. My infractions had never amounted to my having done any actual harm to anyone; they simply have proven, again and again, apparently impossible to coexist with.
The only lasting relief for knowing just how inevitable it is, that like clockwork, I'll find myself comprehensively incompatible with the company of others when trying to live on their terms in order not to disturb their equilibrium at the cost of my own is...... not to try to any more.
But the key to this has ultimately proven to be not to hold it against them. (Or, God help me, at least try not to...)
People are who they are. A lesson I've found the hardest to let sink in is that it may be MY opinion that others are indoctrinated or even enslaved by means of the ways they agree to think, speak, act and live, but this isn't going to turn out to be how they view themselves, and they may actually be onto something. Just as I have my reasons for being 'different' and not being willing to subject myself to what feels to me like moral lobotomy in order not to create disturbance, others tend to have their own reasons for just going ahead and fitting in, and not really minding whatever this may cost them because, in their own assessments, the benefits have been worth the costs.
I just seek out and respond to different benefits than they do. It isn't anyone else's 'fault' that what moves them to act as they do is utterly alien and without value to me, nor is it really mine either.
I am who I am too.
So now in my early sixties, I've spent the bulk of the past quarter-century living alone, and loving it. For the past nine years, this has been under my very own(ed) roof, in my beloved little 1965 single-wide that nobody else wanted and that I've made into a right fine little homestead.
Yes, this has cost me the company and even the presence in my life at all of two very wonderful children, each of whom has gone on and grown up without their dad or even knowing each other (two different moms who hate each other more than both hate me put together); it has cost me ever having known what it means to have a real 'career' (which, as a verb, means to spin wildly out of control in rapid descent, a definition aligning much closer to my own experiences of devoting myself to employers and clientele, than the noun ever has), or any fiscal assets worth mentioning, or any sense that even my own family really ever wanted much to do with me if I wasn't planning to leave soon before things turn unpleasant between us.
Three words: SO BE IT.
Not out of spite or even out of resignation, just simple acceptance. I was going to lose all those things and people anyway, or never have them to lose in the first place because, may God forgive me, I'm not at all sure I ever wanted any of them enough to do what it took to have and keep them.
Does this make me a bad person? Those who have decided this in the affirmative about me have this to live with in themselves, and I don't envy them. Having tried to out-judge and out-prosecute others into taking me as I am all my life, I know full well what a burden it is to hold another in such contempt.
So I decided not to any more, and just be what I am. Let them judge me, I don't mind, other than, I hope this doesn't cause them as much harm as my having judged them has caused me. Some will anyway, and this is just no longer any priority for me.