> I've recently been dealing with a very strong feeling of "not fitting in". [...]

> I was moping around feeling lonely and ignored. One of the staff guys, who happens to be hugely intelligent and understanding and just the sort of guy you WANT to talk to about your problems, saw me and immediately knew that I needed to talk.
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> So I spilled everything out to him, and he made some amazingly on-point observations. He said that he went through the same thing in high school, especially his senior year, and he had to figure out how to deal with it - and then he said that NO ONE really fits in anywhere - it's only those who are intelligent and at least somewhat in tune to their emotions that notice it.
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A great burden is lifted when you have found someone to talk to who's on your wavelength. Just to bring up a vaguely related topic, I recall my discussion with gabby awhile back -- about hard consciousness, and the great mystery as to why it's so difficult to accurately present one's experience of intensely private thoughts and feelings to another human being, because we're forced to use the clumsy representations of symbolic language.

Our discussions are an elaborate tapestry of commonly shared meanings. Some people, the more introspective ones, are able to see -- more than others -- that threads of the pattern go off in divergent directions. Those threads often have as much validity and purpose as the majority which already go in one direction. And some threads, or the "mental representations" of some people as you say, end up seeing too much of this, and they never have a sense of "fitting in." It is only certain persons -- like the staff guy you mention -- who seem gifted in empathetic response. They can view the differences in the picture that is within the tapestry, from the perspective of two very different people. Empathic persons can bridge the gap between people.


> The fact that none of us feel that we fit in really is yet another indicator of the level of people RinkWorks draws - people who take the time and energy to really think about themselves and the world about them.
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I think that this last part -- your comment about people -- is the most essential intuition that anyone's plainly observed around here for a long time. Thank you for your observation, and also Travholt for similar thoughts.


> "Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?" (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain)
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