Feeling Outside

My post yesterday on circles sparked a host of other thoughts.  Since I tend to see circles throughout life and relationships, I sometimes find myself feeling left outside the circle.

I'm fifty-five and a half years old (I never outgrew that half year thing), and I was north of fifty by the time I got comfortable in my own skin.

Up until then, the life choices that I made that put me outside the mainstream of my peer group frequently left me feeling outside.

I'll try to explain.   As I have shared before on this blog, I got pregnant at fifteen, in the tenth grade.  I dropped out of school and got married at the end of that school year.  I got my GED, got divorced, and attended college at night while working during the day.  I remarried, and got it right the second time.  I also studied for and obtained professional certification in Occupational Safety and Health, my chosen career.   I was fortunate to achieve remarkable career success.

But as my career advanced, I often felt more and more outside.  My peers all seemed to fit the same mold.  High school, followed by college, followed by employment, followed by marriage, followed by children.   Most people never get too old to tell prom stories, or high school glory days stories, or college dorm stories or fraternity or sorority stories.  Then there are the wedding and honeymoon stories, happy pregnancy stories, and baby showers, nannies and au pairs or stay-at-home partner stories.

My somewhat gritty, hard-knock stories of survival felt embarrassing.  My life choices had made my path more difficult, and my daughter's life path more difficult as well, through no fault of her own.

At times, the weight of trying to fit into their circles was crushing, and there were multiple times after a team meeting or work event that I cried buckets of tears from feeling so isolated in a group of people.  It was as if they all spoke a language I didn't understand.

I don't know exactly what point in time I got over it.  Yes, I took a path less traveled.  Yes, I made some really bad mistakes along the way.  Yes, I made my child's life more difficult than her peers because of my choices.

But I survived, and thrived, and so did my daughter.  At a point I realized I will always be outside the circle of people who never deviated from the prescribed path.  But that puts me inside the circle of people who pick themselves up after a life altering event and keep trying.

And once I embraced myself fully, and stopped feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I stopped feeling so outside.  And started to see that many of the people that had never deviated from the prescribed path felt outside too.

So, I got more comfortable sharing my stories.  I got more comfortable listening to other people's stories.  I got better at seeing the body language that indicates a person feels the need to hide, the body language that says I feel excluded.

Everyone is carrying burdens we can't see. But we can train ourselves to see more clearly when someone is feeling left out and invite them in.

Because I think everyone knows how it feels to be outside.  And most of us like to be invited in.