Day 39 - Feeling Like an Outcast
7:42 AM
Feeling Like an Outcast
I can relate to the experience of feeling like an outcast. It
is very rare that I feel like I fit in comfortably anywhere or in any group.
This is an experience that had to start somewhere, because I wasn’t born
feeling like I don’t belong. It is something that is learned through, friends, famliy
and environment when a child is young and cannot fully understand or process
information, situations and reactions from others. Usually when people would
get mad or upset with me, or if other kids teased me, I would immediately think
there was something inherently wrong with me as a kind of default understanding
of the situation. I never really questioned if it was actually something about
me, and looking back, I see I always had something to explain it or blame
myself with.
When I was younger I
was a tomboy, and I liked to play physical games and rough-house, and most of
my friends were boys. But I always felt secretly ashamed and less-than because
I was a girl. I would notice the boys treated me a bit differently, and it made
me feel different, and I couldn’t play on the same sports teams as my friends.
There were some things I felt awkward doing because I began to understand that
normally, girls don’t do that type of thing. So when other girls would not be
interested in being my friend or would tease me, I felt like an outcast from
both genders and began to define myself as different, but in a ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’
way. It’s as if the way that I was naturally was wrong, and my ‘who I am’ was
breaking some unspoken rules. I felt that I made people mad just by existing. Looking
back now and being able to understand more clearly, I see that it would not
have been impossible to enjoy aspects of both genders, and later on in life I
was able to embrace the femininity I had come to reject for so long, seeing it
instead as a strength and a flexibility.
OCD began presenting itself in my life pretty early on, so
the cuts and scabs and marks on my skin made me a bit of a target, especially
combined with the ‘tomboy’ appearance. OCD is something that I did not
understand and again, did not question, but simply accepted as a part of who
and how I am. I was ashamed of it and did not seek support but rather tried to
hide it and become invisible so as to avoid being teased. This then furthering
my mind’s programming a view of myself as an outcast due primarily to shame. Both
of these issues remained with me for most of my life, with the OCD continuing
but is something I can now see and understand more clearly, and am now
supporting myself to face.
When I was a bit older my family moved to a new neighborhood.
It was one with bigger houses and the kids that I become friends with were from
wealthier families. My family did live in a very nice neighborhood, but were
what is called ‘mortgage poor’. Many of the new friend I became close with were
doing activities such as for example, horse-back riding lessons, or going away
to summer camp, and I did not see the bigger picture of why I couldn’t also do
these things. At first they would show me their medals and tell me all about
camp, but at some point they stopped and started actually hiding things from
me. Once I found out my best friend had bought a snowboard after we had been
talking for a while about how much we wanted to go snowboarding. She later
admitted that she had hidden it from me because she felt bad. I did eventually
get to go to summer camp and get a snow board, but not before having developed
a sense of self-pity. I wasn’t able to see the bigger picture, that my parents
were stabilising in their careers, that there were financial factors that had
to play out. Instead I had defined a part of myself, again, as an outcast,
always a bit ‘off’, or ‘less-than’ in some way, nurturing self-pity and self-diminishment. I see now that all of humanity face different struggles and exist at different levels of income. I see that I am among the elite in the world when I look at the big picture, and I absolutely do not judge the billions of people struggling to survive as 'less-than' or 'pitiful', but rather the consequential outflow of a system designed to create poverty. I see myself now as in a position of responsibility to others, to open my eyes to others and to the reality of our current situation on this planet.
As I got older and
started working, I was confronted with feeling like an outcast due to language
politics. I am part of an English-speaking minority in a French province, and I
began working with the public during a time where there was a lot of social and political tension
between the two groups. I ended up working in a primarily French neighborhood at one point,
and I remember working with people one night that were making fun of the way I
spoke. It got to the point where I eventually broke down crying, believing that the French would never accept me. Most places I
would go when exploring more of the city as I got older would have French
culture or influence, and I would feel I didn’t belong and wasn’t wanted. I had
French people insult me for being English, and there was graffiti in a local
park telling the English to ‘go home’, but to me, this WAS my home!
Looking back I can see that I wanted to be accepted, but the
problem is with the starting point I had at the time. I still saw the French
culture as something foreign that I could not be a part of. I felt a hostility
and separateness that was impenetrable.
So the wanting to be accepted came from me wanting to change my internal
experience and feel better about myself by having others accept me. The way I
see it now is that I was the one creating impenetrable walls around me to
protect myself. I could not, at the time, see that language politics were being
used in a larger political context playing out on a provincial and national
stage, but instead I judged myself for the language I spoke. What I eventually learned
was that in not judging myself and not hiding myself and keeping quiet, but
rather by accepting MYSELF, I am able to open up more to, with sincere intrigue
and acceptance, get to know a whole other culture and see and realize how it
came to be, and understand where it comes from. Within this, I am now able to
get to know other human beings, and see that all human beings are influenced
and affected by the culture within which they are raised, myself included. I
also see how the two cultures are not
mutually exclusive, and have grown and developed together, intersecting and
intertwining at points, having a mutual effect on each other. Now I feel like I
can actually appreciate this difference that exists where I live, and learn a
lot from it as well, but not because anybody else started doing anything
differently. It all started to change when I started to change myself.
There are many times now where this program still gets triggered
in my mind, and I judge myself and then blame something outside of me and feel
like an outcast again. It’s persistent because it starts so early in life, before
understanding, so it becomes the accepted explanation. There is a group now of
people that are very inspiring to me, people that I admire very much, where my ‘outcast
system’ often becomes triggered. Looking at it now, I can see that I am judging
myself because I know that I could be doing better, and doing more in many
ways. I also see that I am not giving myself credit for the things I am working
on or have done, but instead only focusing on the ‘negatives’ and allowing
myself only to look at what I am not doing well. These different dimensions trigger
the self-impression that I am not good enough, not worthy, destined to be an
outcast. But the difference here is that this is the present moment, which is
the moment where I have the power to do things differently. The moments in the
past have already happened, so all I can do is look back and see how I could
have done things differently or better to be more supportive towards myself.
But things that come up now where I start to feel like an outcast again are
like opportunities for me to look a little deeper, and do something different
NOW, and change the experience while I am in it. I will start with some
self-forgiveness on the point.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to judge
myself within comparison to people that I admire or look up to, wherein,
instead of ‘looking up to’ them, I can look to them as a resource that I can
use to assist and support myself to overcome the obstacles I face, turning
every obstacle into a gift of learning and overcoming.
When and as I see that I am ‘looking up to’ others in
comparison and self-judgment, I stop, and I breathe, I bring myself back to
equality and oneness by reminding myself that I can instead look to others to
learn and use their experience to apply in my own life that which can assist and
support me to be the best possible version of myself in my own unique and
individual way. I see, realize and understand that by using judgment and
comparison I am only denying myself an opportunity to grow, to learn, to evolve
and to expand.
I commit myself to identify moments of judgment and
comparison, and look for ways to turn it into learning, growing and expanding.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think,
believe or perceive that anyone or anything outside of myself can make me less
than or make me an outcast, because in reflecting on my life and investigating
the ‘outcast’ character, I can see that there is and has always been another
way.
When and as I see that I am blaming someone or something
outside of myself for causing me to feel like an outcast, I stop, and I
breathe. I bring myself back to living self-forgiveness by reminding myself
that only I have the power to condemn me, and that this is something I will no
longer accept and allow as part of me and the way I use my power. Instead, I
will use my personal power and decision-making authority to author for myself a
new way of being, by forgiving the old patterns that were learned in un-awareness,
and living instead a new pattern that I choose and that I create, one of
self-acceptance, one of seeing and looking in self-honesty at ways where I can
create a life internally and externally, where I am supported and challenged to
change.
I commit myself to take self-responsibility for my personal
growth, and for stopping my personal self-diminishment.
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe
my mind system program when it tells me I am not good enough, I am shameful and
that I do not belong, and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to
react to this self-talk by diminishing myself, closing myself off and becoming
apparently small and invisible.
When and as I see that I am listening to my mind telling me I
am not good enough, that I am shameful and I do not belong, I stop, and I
breathe. I bring myself back to self-honesty by reminding myself that whenever
I have reflected back, I have always seen another way. I push myself to
override this program by forgiving it and allowing myself to see another way IN
THE MOMENT. I push myself to use this seeing, realizing and understanding to
expand, open up about the challenges I face, interact, ask for support when
needed, and become visible, where I see my POTENTIAL, and not the
self-diminishing version of myself I had grown to accept and allow within me as
my self-definition.
I commit myself to fearlessly become big, visible and open.
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