Live the Questions

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems as though, sometimes, I'm just going along and living my life and not really paying all that much attention to how I feel.... and I suddenly realize that feel like I don't fit in. Anywhere. As though I looked up and either I had changed or everyone/everything else had changed and I wasn't told about it. A lot of the time, I don't feel this way, which is good since I really dislike it. But when I do, I just want to make it stop.

A friend once told me that she always feels like the kid who showed up half-way through the school year at a new school. I think that is a good way to explain this feeling. Even if you are caught up academically, everyone has already reached their quota of friends for the year and there isn't anything you can do to just blend in like you've always been there. You missed out on all those months of whatever happened... so..... yeah. You're the new kid and you don't belong.

I had a paragraph on why I might be feeling this way right now, but it was all conjecture on the perceptions of others. I don't think that is helpful to me right now. I think when I really boil it down, this feeling is because I am suddenly not comfortable in my own skin. I have all these questions and only some answers and I'm afraid if I'm just me and let myself be too comfortable, all of this craziness is just going to come gushing out. That I will start saying all of it out loud and completely freak people out. It seems safer to just make polite conversation. To talk about kids and work and the weather. To keep things more on the surface.

I know there are people with whom I do fit in. Some other kindred spirits who either feel the same way or don't mind being friends with the new kid. But they have their things too. They have to change and question and process and live. There are just those times when it feels like I need to process things in my own mind. And, despite that I know they would listen, I should just keep my insanity to myself. For now, anyway.

I really need to work on being able to deal with these times without it interfering with my self-perception. This awkward, out-of-touch thing originates with me. In me. When I found the quote above, I read it over and over, letting it sink in. I need to live like that. Not ignoring my questions, but not letting them consume me. I need to realize that I may find the answers, in time, through the moving on without them.