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October 27th, 2009
![[info]](http://piktures.deadjournal.com/userinfo.gif) localfreak | 09:08 pm - The Not-Belonging
As I was sitting on the bus of doom yesterday, after spending a day cooped up in a small room being generally miserable and treated like scum because I'm unemployed, I suddenly experienced a peculiar feeling. The feeling of being the outsider.
I've always, to some extent, felt this of myself- the name 'localfreak' wasn't coined out of thin air, you know. But in many ways, I don't quite fit being neither of one thing or the other. Being...well..strange. I'm not teetotal,but I don't get drunk. My hobbies are...eclectic to say the least, and just generally there's always been something a bit odd about me. I felt it very sharply just then.
In a social community and class in which gender roles are oddly strictly defined, in millions of little ways, I listened on the bus to the boys talking. They made the usual jokes at each other, vicious little slurs, backbiting and teasing, using the idea of 'bumming' one another as a threat. I smiled a little at their antics, both uncouth and swearing like navvies but also like little wolves or dogs squabbling and mounting trying to climb up the pack hierarchy. I've compared boys like this before, and girls too, because the majority of the girls were the same. In the rooms where I had just been, they huddled around the same table automatically, with the same kind of biting and sniping at each other (all in a friendly and affable vicious way) and occasionally foraying out amoung the boys, bantering and snapping at them.
And then there was me. Who didn't fit into either. It's not a concious thing for them, just a subconcious shift that there has always been in groups like this, since childhood. I sat, briefly, on the 'girls' table when they were out to share fags and when I returned they tolerated me affably,but with an air of bewilderment I don't think either of us could articulate.
The same thing occured when I moved back to sit with the boys on the computers. Over the years both groups have tried to fit me into the category they feel I should be in, from the boys in high school making sexualised jokes at my expense (although only very rarely) to the girls in juniors teasing me and pressuring me into clothes and magazine collections that I did not initially wish for. But I have never quite worked. Never quite belonged.
I understand what a friend-blogger I know means, when he refers to himself as the lonely gender.
And I'm not the only one who suffers for this 'not-quite'ness. I have known several trans and genderqueer persons whom have had this occur. Two in particular spring to mind, one was accepted by the other boys but only in a strange, unsure sort of way,the other I don't know about so much,but the girls- well so many of them expressed an irrational seeming dislike of them. I would ask 'why don't you like them?' and the responses would generally be vague and unclear 'I don't think they like me' 'I think he looks down his nose at me' 'She's a snotty bitch' etc, with no real basis. To me it is another symptom of the not-quiteness.
I don't make an effort to 'pass' as male or female, these days. I don't announce my gender or sexual orientation from the rooftops. I work on the premise of being totally open, and therefore having no need to announce anything unless someone asks a direct question on the subject. Very few people do. But whether I leave them to come to their own conclusions about me or not, the Not Quite Belonging is always there.
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