Some people spend their lives trying to fit in. I spent mine trying to understand why I never could.
I always sensed an unspoken distance between me and the world around me. I didn’t have language for it back then—I just knew I felt everything more intensely than those around me.
At home, emotions weren’t spoken. My mother kept things contained. The walls didn’t echo with comfort or chaos—just silence.
I was a peculiar child in many ways—restless for meaning, hungry for understanding, writing with a voice far older than my years.
I absorbed existential truths at an age when most kids were still parroting cartoons.
Independence was my lifeline. So was expression. I needed space to think, feel, create—long before I knew why.
There was an ache behind it all—a sense that I didn’t quite belong. But later, there was also clarity. I knew I wasn’t built for the life I saw modeled around me, and I didn’t pretend to want it.
“He was alone. He was a man of intellect, a thinker, a seeker. But he was also a wolf of the steppes, wild, untamed, and unable to belong.”
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
When I first read Steppenwolf in my youth, I remember the quiet relief of recognition—someone else had felt this, too. It resonated. I didn’t feel as strange for sensing what I did. Hesse’s outsider—part human, part wolf—lived between identities, never fully belonging to one world or another. It wasn’t dramatized. It was honest. It gave language to the in-between space I lived in—mirroring something I hadn’t yet been able to name. A story about the coexistence of contradictions.
Being an outsider wasn’t something I chose. It was something I recognized. A familiar knowing I carried long before life gave it context.
Outside the Frame in Childhood
I didn’t grow up with siblings, and there weren’t cousins nearby. My parents were older than most—my father significantly older than my mother. Inside the walls of our home, it was a quiet, emotionally sparse world. My mother was critical, contained, tightly wound. I don’t have memories of being comforted or held—just an early awareness that I couldn’t sit still, and that my restlessness irritated her.
She didn’t know what to do with a child wired like me—intense, expressive, restless. My innate intensity was the opposite of everything she tried to control. She managed the household, and she managed me. My father deferred child-rearing to her entirely. I’m not sure she ever truly wanted the role of wife, mother, caretaker. And I was the constant reminder
Emotions were unspoken. I learned early that expressing too much came with consequences—withdrawal, judgment, silence.
So I read. I observed. I wrote, out of necessity, to have somewhere to put what I was feeling. I became hyperaware of the energy at home and adjusted myself accordingly.
It was like learning a second language—one built on tone, posture, and restraint. I did it without thinking.
It was a skill, born of survival—but it kept me on the outside, even in my own family.
I was often the scapegoat when tensions rose—too loud, too reactive, too much.
The problem was rarely the atmosphere. It was me, for responding to it.
Still, I wasn’t completely alone. I grew up in Brooklyn—a true melting pot. Cultures, languages, music spilling out of corner stores and apartment windows. I had places to go.
I had best friends—but things shifted, and I shifted with them.
On weekends, I made my rounds—drifting between contrasting friend circles that took me in and would never have mixed on their own.
It gave me freedom. A way to belong loosely, without ever having to anchor myself too deeply.
But even then, I carried that quiet sense of separation. Like I was always observing from just outside the frame.
“I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own.”
—Hesse, Demian
Outside the Frame in Womanhood
I didn’t follow the script.
Marriage, motherhood, the slow choreography of settling down—it never pulled at me the way it seemed to pull others. I wasn’t opposed to love or partnership. I just wasn’t as driven to hit the milestones. Over time, our lives moved in different directions.
Friends got married. Had children. Their lives became filled with school pickups, playdates, the logistics of family. The distance grew. We drifted.
In their place, I found something different—an orbit of women, many of whom had either stepped away from the traditional path or simply never found their place within it.
Women from different backgrounds and cultures, shaped by different stories—some who chose not to marry or have children, others for whom it just didn’t unfold that way.
It wasn’t something we planned, but it made sense.
We didn’t need to explain ourselves.
Our conversations weren’t about white dresses, due dates, or square footage.
There was freedom in that.
In my twenties—and well into my forties—I felt hyper-visible. Watched. Commented on. Sexualized.
And then, it shifted. I became almost invisible overnight.
Not to myself, but to the world’s commentary.
It was ironic, really. I had spent years resenting that kind of attention—hating being the focal point in that way.
As a young adult, I remember changing out of work clothes before heading home—dressing down, hiding in baggy layers to deflect the gaze
And then suddenly, it was gone.
And with it, a part of me.
I crossed some unseen line—where women become less relevant, less noticed.
Culturally, womanhood had its own frame—narrow, scripted, well-lit. I didn’t want to be in it. But not being in it came at a cost. I was seen as independent, maybe even admirable from a distance. But underneath that was a quieter judgment: What’s wrong with her?
I chose a different kind of life—one that was mine.
Outside the Frame in Marriage
And then, much later in life, I did marry.
When I did, the roles were already established—his children, his history, their rhythms. I was starting a partnership, but not a new life built together. I was stepping into one that had already taken shape. In many ways, I was folding myself into an existing structure—one that wasn’t built with me in mind.
From the outside, it might have looked blended. But I often felt like a guest. I wasn’t part of the architecture—and often, my presence felt peripheral. And when communication went sideways, it wasn’t the situation that drew focus—it was my reaction to it.
I guess I believed it would work itself out. That love meant adapting.
But over time, adapting started to feel like erasing.
Gradually I withdrew—from dynamics I couldn’t influence and didn’t belong to. Not out of resentment, but out of self-preservation.
Marriage, in our shared life, gave me joy and emotional belonging with him.
But the larger structure—the one I stepped into—wasn’t built for me.
I could live within it, but never fully inside it.
Outside the Family of Origin
II found out in November 2019 that I wasn’t my mother’s only child.
Two siblings—one brother, one sister—born long before me, both surrendered for adoption.
The discovery didn’t come from my mother, but from an email sent by my brother.
He had just learned he was adopted—something he was never told. It was devastating for him.
In that, we bonded—exchanging emails, trying to make sense of a shared past none of us had lived.
He later found our sister.
She had always known she was adopted and had reached out to our mother back in the ’90s.
She never received a response.
They’ve met several times.
The three of us continue to exchange separate email updates.
My mother passed on February 7, 2022.
And for more than two years, I felt unraveled—physically depleted, emotionally frayed.
In grief. In transition. In survival.
I still haven’t met my siblings.
There were too many layers to hold all at once: the shock, the timing, the pressure to show up whole when I wasn’t.
The invitation didn’t come from those who knew me, but from siblings I’d never met—emails I missed, or opened too late.
And the truth is, I didn’t have the emotional capacity to be part of it then.
My siblings were born in her country. I was the American. The outsider.
The timing wasn’t just off—it was late.
By a few decades.
Another lifetime.
I felt erased. Replaced.
The discovery was an explanation wrapped in a wound—
a key to the silence I had been raised inside,
and a reminder of the roles I was never meant to understand, only absorb.
It was another story I had to enter midstream—
another place where the emotional architecture had already formed without me.
“Every person’s life is a journey into himself.”
—Hermann Hesse
Reframing the Outsider
Across every layer—childhood, womanhood, marriage, origin—the outsider role followed me.
Not because I chose it, but because I never fit the script I was handed—and eventually, I stopped trying.
Family, culture, tradition—even love—were shaped by rules, rhythms, and expectations I didn’t create—and couldn’t follow without erasing parts of myself.
For a long time, I tried to understand why I never fit.
I told myself: try harder. Stay quieter. Bend a little more.
But the truth is, some rooms were never built to hold you.
Some stories were already in motion—and you were handed a part that never fit.
Being outside the frame doesn’t mean you don’t exist.
It means you see the whole picture—clearly enough to draw your own.
