The Gift of the Outsider

1/25/2022 Update: Finding these old posts ... especially ones where I can see learning and growth in the time between ... is like treasure. I didn't know twelve years ago how much a gift my lonely childhood was. Now, I understand that everything that has made me who I am was a gift.

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In her book "The Seeker's Guide," Elizabeth Lesser states, "I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the 'gift' of not belonging." 

 Gift? I never thought of it that way. Lesson, maybe. But ... gift? Those long, endless days of my lonely childhood as the incubator, the essential element, of my writer's soul? 

 There is no doubt that I was an outsider ... an only child growing up in the country spending more time with Anne of Green Gables and Dorothy on her trip through Oz than the flesh-and-blood playmates of real life. Books were my friends, my teachers, my magic carpet taking me far beyond the small, southeastern Kansas town where I lived and introducing me to people in all parts of the world, past, present and future. 

And that journey made me different, not quite on the same page as anyone else I knew. Hard as I tried, I couldn't quite force myself into the mold that would have let me truly belong. Outsider was tattooed on my forehead. 

So I asked one of my new best friends, "What does it mean to be an outsider?" and Google replied:

Being an outsider can do either or both of two things to a person (or a group in society). It can make you feel alone, lonely, isolated ... faceless, nameless, voiceless ... like you don't have a say in decisions that concern you. But it can also give you a unique perspective on the people around you or on your society as a whole. But, as Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play "An Enemy of the People", "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

And because Google has many voices, I also found a long discussion of one of my favorite poems from Emily Dickinson ...

I'm nobody!

Who are you? 

Are you nobody, too? 

Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! 

They'd banish us, you know. 

How dreary to be somebody! 

How public, like a frog 

To tell your name the livelong day 

To an admiring bog!

It seems that being an outsider was part of Emily's "gift" also. And, like many gifts, one wonders if there were a return counter for life's "gifts," which ones would we return and which ones would we keep now that we know what it brought us. 

I can't imagine a life without writing so perhaps a lonely childhood as an outsider was a fair price to pay for the world of books and the joy of words.