The Misfit

Every morning, she looked at her face in the mirror. “Yes, those are definitely my mother’s eyes, and that is without question my father’s nose. I guess I’m really not adopted.” So why, then, did she feel adopted?

She didn’t think like her parents and her brother; she knew there was more to life than could be found in their small, rural corner of the South. Her parents had always lived there, as had her grandparents, and her great-grandparents, stretching back 200 years. But she didn’t belong there; it wasn’t really a home for her soul.

Her parents were puzzled by her, she could tell. “You’re just too sensitive.” “Why are you worried about that, that has nothing to do with you?” “You don’t really think that.”

School wasn’t any better. She didn’t fit in there, either. She was a tomboy and a bookworm, neither of which was likely to win her lots of friends. When she was younger, she mostly played with the boys, because their games were more interesting. But she matured early, and her mother discouraged her from playing with the boys so much once her breasts started showing.

Her soul found no refuge at church, either. The hellfire and damnation God of the South just convinced her further that she was somehow wrong, because she didn’t get it. There were too many things that didn’t make sense to her mind. When the preacher told her that we knew the Bible was true because the Bible told us it was true, she assumed that it was something in her that was flawed, because she couldn’t understand that reasoning. She learned to keep her mouth shut as much as possible, to parrot the answers her Sunday School teachers expected, and above all, not to ask questions.

She tried to go along, to fly under the radar, to hide her real thoughts and feelings. Every now and then, she couldn’t keep it all under wraps, and a stray dream would slip out from her tight control. Those moments were often devastating. Fragile, little dream balloons were shot down out of the sky by the flamethrower of her mother’s fear, raining down fiery debris on her. She emerged from those experiences determined to never let it happen again, and to go far away as soon as she could.

Fortunately, she was smart, and she could see a path out: education. Her parents valued education greatly, and she could see that getting a college degree was her ticket out. She didn’t have to marry somebody to leave home, she didn’t have to run away from home with no money and try to find a way to survive, she could get a college scholarship! Her parents would prefer for her to stay home and go to the local college “at least for the first couple of years, then transfer”, but if she could earn a scholarship from a college away from home, she could leave home sooner.

So she held it together, wishing there were someone she could talk with, someone around who really resonated with her soul. She survived with books and booze, numbing the pain that comes with being so out of sync with the world she found herself in. She dodged the land mines of her mother’s anger, and made it to safety: college.

She still didn’t trust, but now she had hope. She at last felt like her journey could begin; maybe somewhere there were other people like her.