Being Weird

My 25^th high school reunion will be coming up this summer. I went back for my 20^th, but I doubt I’ll bother making a special effort to go to my 25^th. If it happens to fall when I’m taking my daughter back to spend time with her grandparents, maybe I’ll drop in.

It’s not because I harbor a lot of resentment about my high school years; I don’t. High school wasn’t bad; it was the first time I was able to assemble anything like a social group of people similar to me. Most of those people weren’t in my particular class, though; in fact, most of the people I hung out with were in the class ahead of mine. Senior year was a little lonely after they had all departed for college, but I was planning my escape to college then, anyway.

The reason I probably won’t bother is that I just don’t care that much. It was interesting to go to my 20 year reunion and see people, almost all of whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years, but it’s not as if I suddenly rekindled relationships with them. It was nice to see them, but we really don’t have that much in common. Just about all of the people who came to the reunion either still live in the town we grew up in, or live within a few hours drive. I live on the other side of the country.

There are reasons I live on the other side of the country, and not all of them are about keeping distance between me and my family. Despite the fact that my roots run deep in that part of the country, I never felt like a native plant. It’s a very strange feeling to go back there, to feel the longing for my roots, but to know that I don’t blossom there. I’m an exotic plant there, and I need other exotic plants around me to thrive.

I don’t know what made me different. My family has been in that little corner of Tennessee for over 200 years. I don’t think it was wanderlust or a need for adventure that pushed me away to college, and then out of the South for grad school. I think it was just a sense that I didn’t think and feel like the people around me, even though I loved them and they loved me. I just didn’t belong.

I’m glad I left, and I have no desire to move back. I still have lots of family there, and I love them, but I can’t live near them. I have friends who are still there, even other “exotic plant” friends. The pull to stay in the South is strong; the family ties there are hard to resist. One of my exotic plant friends from college tried to move to California a few years back. I recently talked with her, and she was moving back after five years, because California had never felt like home to her.

The South was always and never home for me. When I go back and walk the land where my parents live, where my grandparents lived, where their parents lived, I miss it. Part of me wishes I could go back there. After a few days there, though, I remember why I don’t live there anymore. After a few days, I can feel myself start to shut down, to hide, to close off. All my instincts start screaming, don’t let them see you! And my exotic bloom closes.

How did I manage to achieve escape velocity? How did I avoid the tractor beam pulling me back there? I had always felt weird and alone growing up, so going to a strange place where I didn’t know anybody and the culture was very different, as I did when I left the South, wasn’t that much different for me. I could handle being weird long enough to discover that in grad school, I was a little less weird than I had been in college, where I was a little less weird than I had been in high school. There were more people like me, and maybe just as important, more people even weirder than me! Compared to a lot of the people there, I was pretty damn normal.

There are people like me in the world, and there are places where there are even enough of us for me to form a social group and feel less alone. I had that in grad school, and I had that in California. I can’t tell yet where the partial pressure of people like me is high enough here or not. But I know how to tolerate being weird and alone for a while.

And I can even do it sober, now.