What it is like to be an outsider everywhere you go - unless it’s happening to them, too. Cliques are bloody everywhere: at your local bar, at your school, at your office, on your damned train, for Christ’s sakes. And cliques’ entire purpose is to make people feel left out, less than, overall awfully about themselves - unless, of course, they’re accepted, thanks to whatever invisible sense of coolness they radiate, or hoops they’ve had to jump through in order to please these people.
And then there are the predators. Not so much physical ones (although, sometimes), but mental ones. People who stalk the train station looking for someone who seems weak enough for them to push violently out of their way, or who hate their civil service job so much that they take it out on their clientele, or whose parents didn’t show them enough love, so they lash out at others around them. These types of people LOVE outsiders - they’re their prime bread and butter. Bystanders will glance confusedly over at you as you are responding to the transgression, but humans are blind, and will invariably just think you are the cause of the disagreement. Outsiders may as well have technicolor bullseyes painted upon their heads, because everyone will target them, even other outsiders.
And then there are those who love to get close to an outsider, tell them that they look up to them, that anybody would be lucky to have them around, just to drop them from the priority list once someone more interesting shows up, once they’ve gotten all that they can from them. The users. Sometimes they’ll check back in when nothing else is going on, or when they feel lonely, or when they miss the coddling that the outsider always gives them, no matter how much they’ve been hurt, and then bounce again, reopening the wound.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Well, unless you’ve gone home and literally collapsed from the exhaustion of being tightly wound all day, always braced for a fight, or burst into tears unprovoked, having been left out, talked about, rejected, disrespected, sneered at, napped at, glared at, glanced disgustedly at, verbally and physically assaulted, you will never, ever understand what it is like to be a person like this, or how difficult it is to just exist in your own body.
They write songs about this stuff. Tragic ones. But everyone just dismisses them as pretty metaphors. And then, when one of us gives up, it’s just chalked up to weakness. Yep. And you can’t explain it well to anyone else, because unless they’re the same way, They just. Don’t. See it.