belonging – a place to call your own

I was thinking about ‘belonging’ earlier, and how I have always felt like I’ve never really belonged anywhere. I want to talk about this in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way without playing myself up or putting myself down, which is a surprisingly tough thing to do.

I was a bit of a weird loner kid at home, always reading a book or ‘on the computer’. I was never completely isolated, though. I always had some friends, typically the clowns and troublemakers, and occasionally a curious guan person – but I was never really in anybody’s ‘inner circle’. I don’t think anybody ever particularly considered me a ‘best friend’. You know how some people have a group of 4-7 friends that they met in school, used to invite each other into mass MSN texts, now are in the same WhatsApp group, will be each others’ groomsmen and bridesmaids, and then their kids will play together?

Yeah, I’ve never had that. I have some really old friends, of course, and some of my favourite people are the ones I meet every other year or so.

I’ve mostly always been a part of a fringe group of outsiders – the smoking corner. People come and go. We’re like the stragglers.

I like observing people. I pay careful attention to groups of people when I’m in public places. I notice, for example, that secondary school students have lunch in very homogenous groups – all the Indian kids sit together. I was never “one of the Indians” – my street Tamil was too poor, I was too detached from the pop culture. Which was an interesting double-bind. I couldn’t assimilate perfectly with the dialect guys (one of my brothers did this), and I couldn’t assimilate perfectly with the… I don’t know what you’d call them, but I’m sure you can think of them – the mix of malay and indian boys who play football.

There are all these other things, too. I’m left handed in a right handed world, which is just this constant mild annoyance. I’m 1.9m tall in a short country, which means nothing fits. I can’t buy anything off the rack. I don’t think I’ve ever worn clothes that actually fit well.

I can remember all the groups I sort of “passed through”. I used to play basketball with students from PRC. I tried running with some Track and Field guys but I wasn’t athletic enough. I joined the IT Club but I wasn’t quite techie enough. I pretty much sleepwalked my way through all of JC – classrooms seemed to inevitably split into cliques of 5-7, and somehow I just slipped through all of the cracks. I was probably too distant. God, I hated JC. A part of me is glad that TPJC will cease to exist. But that’s kinda rude to say, because lots of people did have good experiences and memories.

The two places I’ve ever really felt like I’ve belonged: in books, and on the Internet.