Some people spend their lives trying to fit in. I spent mine trying to understand why I never did.
I always sensed an unspoken distance between me and the world around me. I didn’t have language for it back then—I just knew I felt things more deeply than those around me.
At home, emotions weren’t spoken. My mother kept everything contained. The walls didn’t echo with comfort or chaos—just silence.
I was a peculiar child in many ways—restless for meaning, hungry for understanding, writing with a voice far older than my years.
I absorbed existential truths at an age when most kids were still parroting cartoons.
I learned to blend in just enough to be welcomed—never fully, but enough to pass through.
Independence was my lifeline. So was expression. I needed space to think, feel, create—long before I knew why.
There was an ache behind it all—a sense that I didn’t quite belong. But later, there was also clarity. I knew I wasn’t built for the life I saw modeled around me, and I didn’t pretend to want it.
“He was alone. He was a man of intellect, a thinker, a seeker. But he was also a wolf of the steppes, wild, untamed, and unable to belong.”
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
When I first read Steppenwolf in my youth, I felt an unexpected relief of recognition—someone else had felt this, too.
It resonated. I didn’t feel as strange for sensing what I did.
He moved between identities—part human, part wolf—never fully belonging to one world or another.
It wasn’t dramatized. It was honest.
It gave language to the in-between space I occupied—mirroring something I hadn’t yet been able to name: the coexistence of contradictions.
Being an outsider wasn’t something I chose. It was something I recognized—a familiar knowing I carried long before life gave it context.
I kept myself alive — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually — in ways that were ingenious for my age.
I was a quiet, unseen, emotionally perceptive child who instinctively championed other kids who needed a safe place to land — because I knew what it felt like to live in the void. I recognized the ones who were overlooked, misunderstood, or struggling, not because anyone taught me to, but because their loneliness mirrored something in me.
I wasn’t hardened by my childhood — I was sensitized by it.
That sensitivity became my compass.
It shaped how I moved through the world, how I related, what I noticed, and what I carried.
My sensitivity wasn’t just vulnerability — it was a way of seeing the world that became my strength, long before I could name it as one.
I learned to read emotional weather before I could read words — a skill that kept me safe, but also kept me outside the frame.
Outside the Frame in Childhood
I didn’t grow up with siblings, and there weren’t grandparents or cousins nearby — just a small, scattered family orbiting at a distance.
My parents were older than most—my father significantly older than my mother. Inside the walls of our home, it was quiet—emotionally sparse. My father was jazz—warm, expressive, easygoing. He wasn’t the parent who set the rules—he was the one who breezed in with a smile. My mother was classical—measured, restrained, composed. I don’t have memories of being comforted or held—just an early awareness that I couldn’t sit still, and that my fidgeting irritated her.
She didn’t know what to do with a child wired like me—intense, expressive, restless. My innate intensity was the opposite of everything she tried to control. She managed the household, and she managed me. My father deferred child-rearing to her entirely. I’m not sure she ever truly wanted these roles.
Emotions were unspoken. I learned early that expressing too much came with consequences—criticism, nagging, judgment.
She didn’t attune to what I needed—or notice what I felt.
So I read. I observed. I wrote, out of necessity, to have somewhere to put what I was feeling. I became hyperaware of the emotional currents at home and adjusted myself accordingly.
It was like learning a second language—one built on tone, posture, and restraint. I did it without thinking.
As a child, I thought her distance meant there was something in me that overwhelmed her.
I carried that belief like a private fault line.
I didn’t understand that she was protecting something in herself, not rejecting something in me.
That understanding came much later—but its shadow shaped everything that came before.
It was a skill, born of survival—but it kept me on the outside.
I was often the scapegoat when tensions rose—too loud, too reactive, too much.
The problem was rarely the dynamic. It was me, for responding to it.
Still, I wasn’t completely alone. I grew up in Brooklyn—a true melting pot. Cultures, languages, music spilling out of corner stores and apartment windows. I had places to go.
I had best friends—but as things shifted, I followed my own rhythm.
On weekends, I made my rounds—drifting between contrasting friend circles that took me in and would never have mixed on their own.
It gave me freedom—a loose kind of belonging that didn’t require anchoring.
Even then, I sensed that my belonging would always be conditional—governed by tone, timing, and how well I could adapt.
“I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own.”
—Hesse, Demian
That awareness followed me into womanhood, shaping the way I moved through spaces that expected something different from me.
Outside the Frame in Womanhood
I didn’t follow the script.
Marriage, motherhood, the slow choreography of settling down—it never pulled at me the way it seemed to pull others. I wasn’t opposed to love or partnership. I just wasn’t as driven to hit the milestones. Over time, our lives moved in different directions.
Friends got married, had children. Their lives became filled with school pickups, playdates, the logistics of family.
We drifted.
In their place, I found something more grounding—an orbit of women, many of whom had either stepped away from the traditional path or simply never found their place within it.
Women from diverse backgrounds and cultures, shaped by different stories—some who chose not to marry or have children, others for whom it just didn’t unfold that way.
It wasn’t something we planned, but it made sense.
We didn’t need to explain ourselves.
Our conversations weren’t about white dresses, due dates, or square footage.
There was freedom in that.
I was happy in my independence. I marched to my own beat and never needed to be the center of attention.
I didn’t perform. I just lived.
For years, we moved through the world on our own terms—autonomous, confident, and seen. Sometimes even admired.
Work became the place where I could disappear into function.
I thrived on soft structure, independence, and a sense of identity.
I knew the rules, met the goals, played the part.
And for a while, I did well—especially when I had autonomy.
But corporate culture wasn’t built for sensitivity or nuance.
It rewarded performance, not presence.
It was a place where I could be both seen and invisible
Through my twenties—and well into my forties—I felt hyper-visible. Watched. Commented on. Sexualized.
And then, it shifted. I became almost invisible overnight.
Not to myself, but to the world’s commentary.
It was ironic, really. I had spent years resenting that kind of attention—hating being the focal point in that way.
As a young adult, I remember changing out of work clothes before heading home—dressing down, hiding in baggy layers to deflect the gaze
And then suddenly, it was gone.
A strange quiet settled in. Unfamiliar, yet inevitable.
I crossed some unseen line—where women become less relevant, less noticed.
Culturally, womanhood had its own frame—narrow, scripted, well-lit. I didn’t want to be in it. But not being in it came at a cost. I was seen as independent, maybe even respected from a distance.
But beneath that was scrutiny in all its forms—sometimes blatant, sometimes masked as curiosity, always tinged with judgment: What’s wrong with her?
I chose a different kind of life—one that was mine, shaped by instinct, not expectation.
Outside the Frame in Marriage
And then, much later in life, I did marry.
When I did, the roles were already established—his children, his history, their rhythms. I wasn’t beginning a new life built together, but stepping into one that had already taken shape. In many ways, I was folding myself into an existing structure—one that wasn’t built with me in mind.
From the outside, it might have looked blended. But I often felt like a guest. I wasn’t part of the architecture—and often, my presence felt peripheral. And when communication went sideways, it wasn’t the situation that drew focus—it was my reaction to it.
I guess I believed it would work itself out. That love meant adapting.
But over time, adapting started to feel like erasing.
Gradually I withdrew—from dynamics I couldn’t influence and didn’t belong to, out of self-preservation.
Marriage gave me partnership and a shared life—though always within certain limits.
But the roles and structure it came with—the unspoken expectations—weren’t built for me.
I tried to live within them, but I never truly felt at home.
Outside the Family of Origin
I wasn’t my mother’s only child.
Two siblings—one brother, one sister—born long before me, both surrendered for adoption.
The discovery didn’t come from my mother, but from an email sent by my brother.
He had just learned he was adopted—something he was never told. It was devastating for him.
In that, we bonded—exchanging emails, trying to make sense of a shared past none of us had lived.
When I first read his message, my body processed it before my mind did.
Disbelief came first. For a moment, I thought someone had stolen my mother’s identity.
I didn’t believe it could be true.
The words blurred—unreal—as if he were speaking about someone else’s life.
Suddenly, the silence of my childhood had a shape.
It wasn’t emptiness; it was history compressed into quiet.
I had always sensed something unspoken in her, a kind of emotional vacuum I couldn’t name.
This changed the architecture of that memory.
Her restraint wasn’t indifference—it was survival.
She had already lived through the unspeakable: giving away two children before I ever existed.
Her silence was grief sealed tight.
Grief and revelation arrived at the same time—one raw and open, the other sharp and clarifying.
I grieved the mother I lost and the one I never really knew.
Understanding her didn’t soften the ache; it only gave the ache a name.
I could finally see her clearly—as a woman who carried the unbearable alone.
And yet, seeing her that clearly made her feel even further away.
He later found our sister.
She had always known she was adopted and had reached out to our mother back in the ’90s.
She never received a response.
They’ve met several times.
The three of us continue to exchange separate email updates.
My mother passed on February 7, 2022.
And for more than two years, I felt unraveled—physically depleted, emotionally frayed.
In grief. In transition. In survival.
I still haven’t met my siblings.
There were too many layers to hold all at once: the shock, the timing, the pressure to show up whole when I wasn’t.
The invitation didn’t come from those who knew me, but from siblings I’d never met—emails I missed, or opened too late.
My nervous system was already cracked open by grief, upheaval, and months of not feeling like myself.
I was so unwell from all of it.
And the truth is, I didn’t have the emotional capacity to be part of it then.
My body was wise — not avoidant.
My mind said, “ I should go. It’s what people do.”
My body said, “Not yet. Too much. Not safe.”
That wasn’t dysfunction.
In sense, it was my body protecting me — even when it showed up as panic.
I didn’t go out of self-preservation and self-respect —choosing what I could genuinely hold at the time, not what the script demanded of me.
My siblings were born in her country. I was the American. The outsider.
The timing wasn’t just off—it was late.
By a few decades.
Another lifetime.
It was a uniquely cruel inversion:
the children my mother gave away were folded into family,
while I became the outsider.
There was a feeling of being erased.
Replaced.
The discovery was an explanation wrapped in a wound—
a key to the silence I had been raised inside,
and a reminder of the roles I was never meant to understand, only absorb.
It was another story I had to enter midstream—
another place where the emotional architecture had already formed without me.
“Every person’s life is a journey into himself.”
—Hermann Hesse
Reframing the Outsider
Across every layer—childhood, womanhood, marriage, origin—the outsider thread was there.
I never fit the script I was handed, and eventually, I stopped trying.
Family, culture, tradition—even love—were shaped by rules, rhythms, and expectations I didn’t create—and couldn’t follow without erasing myself.
For a long time, I tried to understand why I never fit.
I told myself: try harder. Bend a little more. Rebel.
But the truth is, some rooms were never built to hold you.
Some stories were already in motion—and you were handed a part that was never yours.
I wasn’t always anchored to myself, but I didn’t conform just to be accepted.
I moved between worlds—sometimes embraced, sometimes observing from the edge—always following a thread that felt true.
In time, I learned how to belong to myself.
I wasn’t meant to fit inside the frame—I was meant to see beyond it.
What I thought was just my way of seeing turned out to be my mother’s, too.
She had lived outside the frame long before I even knew there was one—bearing stories she didn’t share, carrying choices that didn’t fit.
The outsider lens wasn’t a flaw. It was a compass.
It led me to my voice, my cadence, and my own way of belonging.
And somewhere along the way, the edge stopped feeling like exile.
I realized I wasn’t standing outside life—I was finally standing inside myself.
The frame didn’t disappear; it just stopped defining where I belonged.
Outside the frame means you see the whole picture, clear enough to draw your own lines.
Belonging was never out there. It’s something I learned to carry within me.
