It was not long after I married my wife when she rolled to me in bed and asked, "Do you think you can ever feel like you fit in?"
I answered no and filed away the question in my mind under the heading of "Reference questions about my existence I don't think I will ever answer".
And while I never forgot the question, I also never spent more than a few minutes thinking about it until today.
You see I am in therapy for my ADHD and after several weeks of hinting at brain spotting, the therapist tried it out on me in an effort to answer the question of why I never fit in.
I grew up not fitting in and spent a great deal of my adult life not fitting in. One incident when I was about three years old seemed to start it all off, and since then it seems I have been on high alert for anyone or anything that highlighted my different-ness with all the tenacity of a hungry lion. Ready to pounce on anything that moved.
In fact, it was one of the reasons I became a sailor and a captain. I flubbed out of the U.S. Coast Guard academy when I was 18 and in response made it my life's goal to become all about the water. In truth, I taught myself how to sail and never realized that my ascent to 100-ton captain would never satiate my desire, largely due to the fact that the whole maritime world is as nepotistic as a Mormon picnic.
Yet I digress. The incident I speak of was when I was three or four and my neighbor's mom piled all the kids into the car to go get ice cream. When I was a boy, we roamed the streets in a large pack of boys who otherwise were a hazard to traffic. It was the 80's and life was good.
My friend Ted's Mom invited all the neighborhood kids to go get ice cream, but told me I was uninvited. She pulled away and left me on the curb, screaming for my mother to come get me because I was too young to cross the street by myself. I yelled for a full hour and half before my mother heard me and came and got me.
I had largely forgotten that incident until my therapy, and it is that incident that I credit with my first experience with being left out.
The next thing that came to mind was the many times my Father forgot to come pick me up.
I say forgot, but he knew he was leaving me there, largely because he was hoping to punish my Mother for divorcing him. Standing, freshly-bathed in my nicest clothes on the sidewalk of my childhood home waiting for a father who was never coming only enhanced that feeling of otherness. But it was that memory that triggered the thought that both of those incidents were not about me.
My Mom was the target of both of those events, as both My Father and Ted's Mom hated My Mother, and the only way they could exact their revenge was to take it out on her little boy.
And it seems I had a pretty good childhood all told. Except for the occasional glancing blow by some twisted adult trying to get retribution from my mother through her little boy, but most of my traumas were not mine. They belonged to other people who had other targets that only somehow found me, but they were never intended for me.
That's not to say when I grew up and started pissing the world off that I wasn't responsible, but the impetus for that was there. The shame is my ADHD brain didn't understand the difference and I had no idea that I was ADHD and walked away from two degrees and a career in journalism thanks to the ensuing Rejection Sensativity Disorder.
But thankfully I'm back and my career in journalism is back, and I'm even on the verge of making my first movie. Living and learning is so damn hard, and being an adult isn't all that great either, but wearing a target on your back for your parent didn't make being a kid any easier.
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