I realize this is not helpful, or only marginally helpful, to otherwise privileged people who don’t fit for hardwired individual reasons (such as being autistic).
But social fit is such a complicated issue and it’s often one more case where identity can be more like a tapestry than a box.
It’s not always you.
I believed that it was me for a long, long time and the real issues were a number of intersecting class and social and cultural dynamics.
Maybe you’re an outsider, because you actually are an outsider. You don’t delusionally FEEL like an outsider (which is how I feel like my therapists treated my social anxiety), and even if you are wired differently than the norm that the school system and industrial culture are built around, you can *still* be excluded or overlooked for being an actual outsider.
And for me (with severe social anxiety and ADHD) it was hard to tease apart what was Society (which prescribes even who is *allowed* to be smart, ambitious, or creative) vs what was my neuro wiring.
“Maybe you’re an outsider, because you actually are an outsider. You don’t delusionally FEEL like an outsider”
This right here is a perfect encapsulation of why i hate the way it’s popular on Tumblr to go “lol hahah you still feel like an outsider? what gives dude you’re not 16 lmaoooooooooooooo”
Sometimes you feel like people are treating you as something alien because they are.
Heh. This phenomenon is, in part – although only in part – a cultural-transition thing, growing out of a particular set of circumstances taking place at a particular time.
The current cohort of adolescents grew up during a period when mainstream Western society was undergoing a massive revision to its canon of stigmatized cultural categories, to the extent that even kids on the playground were deeply affected by it. Things that would have been permanent social marks of Cain in the recent past – ranging from “being gay” to “being really into fantasy books with dragons” – were suddenly being actively valorized. Other stigmatized traits were newly protected by a revised anti-bullying ideology with different type cases. (It’s a lot harder to make fun of someone for being fat, these days, without marking yourself as a bad guy.)
The upshot is that you get a bunch of people who think that they have outsider-y traits, who consume lots of media telling them that in fact they’re surely very oppressed outsiders because they have those traits…but who have in fact never suffered any deleterious social consequences for it.
I would guess that this leads to some pretty weird ideas about what being an “outsider” actually means. It’ll probably become less of a thing once the dust settles and we have a more deeply-embedded sense of who’s in and who’s out, as a general matter.