The extreme side of alienation.
the state or experience of being alienated.
- (in Marxist theory) a condition of workers in a capitalist economy, resulting from a lack of identity with the products of their labour and a sense of being controlled or exploited.
- psychiatry
a state of depersonalization or loss of identity in which the self seems unreal, thought to be caused by difficulties in relating to society and the resulting prolonged inhibition of emotion.
This is the dictionary’s definition of a state of being that I feel everyday.
Definitions of words can vary from person to person, country to country, each of us having our own internal interpretations of what certain things mean to us, and alienation to me feels like:
Stress
Sorrow
Heart ache
I feel:
Invisible
Unwanted
Unloved
There have been many times in my life where I have felt the pure sting of alienation, it’s the kind of thing that creeps up to you in time; your usually fed lies and deceit from your own mind, thinking you could fit in this time, that this time your wanted, your an integral part of this system — and without you everything would break down. But sooner or later it slinks in smoothly and comfortably, like an old acquaintance you occasionally see crossing the road in your old neighbourhood; alienation. It takes a hold of you and suddenly you feel incredibly vulnerable and stupid. You trust the people you thought would be it but it’s gone awry again. You don’t belong here. You aren’t important within this group. You could leave and it wouldn’t bring anybody any pain. You are an alien.
To me when I say alien, I don’t mean green and bug eyed, I mean that something deep within isn’t computing, a part of you is not meshing with any other beings you’ve come into contact with, something stinks, and everyone around you can smell it. Once they breath in this aura, this energy that they can’t quite understand, it’s rather a powerful repellent. You’re not the missing part of the jigsaw, you were never part of the set.
For me this extreme alienation has baffled me for years, every place I’ve ever worked in I have never been integral, in the friendship groups I was a part of, I was never a best friend, even in my family I’m so easily passed over, undesirable to all in every way. It led me down paths like researching ‘Earth Angels’, I am an extreme empath and it can sometimes be a hindrance, so I looked to other beings that could be walking this earth within humanity. Could I be one of them? For a while I believed it could be possible, the thought of being something different, unique even, gave me a lot of comfort; I knew I was special, but I could be a whole other being walking amongst the drones, sounds cool right?
I also thought I was a mutant, but then again I was only 9.
To feel so alone, awkward, and even more vulnerable to the degree where you would rather associate yourself with an out of this world anomaly then with your fellow human beings is what I would describe as extreme alienation.
I’ve had these feelings for nearly a decade, and it doesn’t get any easier; I still don’t get it. The more I try to understand it, confront it even, the more I’m met with people that don't understand what I’m getting at, they can’t see what I see. And this makes life really difficult to live with sometimes, because human social interaction is an integral part of being human, isn’t it?
Unless I’m not human..
