The monotony of being different

All my life I was told I am different. Sometimes it was appreciated, sometimes not so much. 

I was told I had energy unparalleled, sometimes appreciated, other times not. Some people tell me how much they admired me, some said I couldn’t be understood. 

Ever since I was a child, I was told being different is good. 

In school, I was told different people tend to make better lives for themselves. In movies, I was shown that the protagonist is always, well, different. 

These notions influenced my perspective towards life, making me crave the feeling of being different. Having said that, I was never treated like I was different, challenging my notion of me being “different”.

However, sometime back I realized that I was never treated like I was different because no one wanted me to know how different I am. 

Every time something nice happened to me, every time I said something exceptional, people tried to normalize how exceptional these things were. That is when I could understand how I could not be understood easily by people who weren’t different. This made me tough to find people that could speak to me at my level. 

For everywhere I went, I met people who processed things at a much slower pace than me, making me feel like my exceptionality was irrelevant. That instigated an anger in me. 

I was angry about how lonely I could get, I was angry about how monotonous my own thoughts became. 

Having something that you can not share with someone is something I am completely new to, as I was used to sharing everything with my sister. This hit completely differently when I moved away from home. The fact that I didn’t have my sister around me, the fact that everyone around me could process things in a similar way – slower than me; pained me. 

It could have been something I could let go, but instead, I got lost in my own thoughts. My thoughts sent me down a spiral I couldn’t get over, making everything I said similar, monotonous. 

I instantly became everything I hated for so long. I instantly turned into a person that could do nothing but process things slowly. Continuously, every attribute people feared or got inspired by started to die out. 

That’s when I realized the importance of sharing. 

That’s when it struck that my uniqueness wasn’t all about me, it was a combination of how people saw me and how I saw myself. It was important to share how different you are and to people to accept and share their different views for one to grow, and once that channel of osmosis stops, even the cleanest of water bodies can start to rot leaving nothing but stench.