She, the alien
The beach - By mysoulbasedlife.
(Originally written in 2024 and first shared in my Substack journal at @mysoulbasedlife)
She tried not to write lately, because every time she did, she ended up sounding like some half-feral creature observing humanity from a small ledge, outside, watching in secret the lives of others. Not quite in the world, not quite out of it.
She felt like an alien with a childhood stuffed bear, which somehow made the alien-ness worse. And the shame of it all, god, the shame poured over her like the cruel fluorescent lights of a department store changing room.
“Your situation is unusual,” a therapist once said, with that steady, clinical voice that made her want to crawl under the chair and hiss. She hoped it wasn’t unusual, she really did; so much that she was struck speechless (unusual for her), and she just sat there not breathing. It was at that very moment that she realized she actually clung to the idea that there were secret pockets of people like her everywhere, camouflaged in self-made nests, quietly surviving without the family webbing that everyone else seemed born into.
People with husbands, children, siblings, whole sets of relatives who texted group chats like flocks of birds. We this and we that.
She had tiny “we”.
A pocket-sized we. But it never felt like the kind they meant. It felt like a thrift-store Lite-Brite without blackout paper; we were just plastic pegs, glowing sadly in the light of others.
She didn’t mind being alone. Truly. She liked her own company, most days. It was quieter, and she didn’t have to pretend her thoughts weren’t ricocheting like tiny, rude meteors. But still…
If this kind of wandering-through-the-human-experience speaks to you, I tuck more of it over on SoulNotes.
