Not sure if this will help you in your personal life, but I’ve been in your position and I’ve found I can be a “translator” in the workplace. You should be a PM of developers or something!
As a developer, I always appreciate a project manager that can do this.
You just described me. I don’t think I’d ever linked this particular part of my personality to why I enjoy and am good at being a product manager… I just always thought of it as enjoying being IT-adjacent without missing my saga* of being in IT. But your reasoning makes so much sense!
It might also be why I feel like a different person at work than in my personal life—more confident, more outgoing… because in my personal life I feel like I’m on the margins of every groups I’ve ever been a part of, but at work I found that to be an important place to be.
*”Saga” was an autocorrect that I didn’t notice until after I posted this, but now I don’t know what I meant to write. And honestly, “saga” feels accurate enough so whatever, I’m leaving it.
I think you need better weirdos. None of the steange folk I’ve ever met are exclusionary.
Lucky you
This sounds like what every almost entirely normal person thinks
looking back i think i would’ve been happier if i embraced being a weirdo and focused on befriending other weirdos. just a thought op!
I just can’t jump the shark and commit to fully living in the weird people world. I actually love having a foot in both worlds most of the time, but it does get hard to vent and talk about things like the fucking Epstein files with normies.
There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
Me too, my friend. Me too
Meanwhile, I’m too weird even for the weird people…
Just be yourself, be kind, make an effort -and- don’t obsess over this type of category bullshit. You’ll find your tribe, I guarentee it.
Have you tried committing to one side or the other?
I’ve tried, but the problem is I enjoy both and also apparently have commitment issues.
Nothing is binary
I took a bio psych class that got into neurotransmitters and shit, the professor started almost every class with:
“Normal” is just the average, if anyone was exactly “normal” they’d be the weirdest most unique human ever
Because a lot of people get freaked out about their own when they start learning about psychology or genetics, smacking them together and teaching 20 somethings is a recipe for existential crisis.
Your brain is sorting people into binary groups because that’s an easy shortcut our brain uses for everything. But what’s normal at the gathering of the juggalos is weird almost everywhere else. It’s all subjective and there’s a lot more ways than one to be normal.
Maybe someone is 99.9999% “normal” but they peel hard boiled eggs with their teeth like a psychopath. You’d never know till you saw them do it, but it would instantly recategorize them in your head as “weird” without a second thought.
But everyone knows they’re actually a unique snowflake, so it’s common for people to feel like they don’t belong to just one group. When it’s that everyone has that level of uniqueness, it’s just too much for our brains to keep track of, so we throw labels on people and treat them as groups.
Why do you think you don’t fit in?
You accepting that you don’t fit into a box gives you a leg up on both the weirdos and the normal people. Everyone is a bit of both when the stop repressing themselves.
I love my personality with this situation because my autism makes it almost impossible for me not to mask the people around me. I find myself fitting in with the most different groups purely because I’m open minded and masking everyone around me. Blessing and a curse for sure but learning how to refrain from saying things that are ‘weird’ to the current group has helped me a ton.
