When "different" is seen as dangerous

Fame and attention is a common theme in my life right now. I guess when you are overcoming a fear, it has a way of poking at you.

That’s right, I’m scared of attention, especially the attention that fame might bring. Those who have been following me for a while may know that already but I think there are only 2 or 3 people who know the extent of that fear.

It absolutely crippled me for years. I’ve been called arrogant for thinking that I actually could be famous, but I know something that many people don’t. Some people are just different and different tends to attract attention.

I’ve always been one of those people. I’ve gotten accustomed to warning certain people that my interests or ideas or behavior might be strange. Open minded people think I’m being silly, but they aren’t able to see just how often my ideas or my sense of humor or my point of focus was called “strange” or “weird” when I was young. People in school used to think I was on drugs because I was always tuned to a different key.

I don’t think I’m strange, but if you get called strange enough you start to feel like it may be better just to give people a heads up what they are in for.

I no longer get off on being different. I used to, but now I don’t. I don’t think I’m special by nature, I think my genes probably hurt as much as they help 😆, but I have always stood in certain places that other people don’t stand. My curiosity draws me there. “Why don’t people talk to her?” “Why do people hate this place?” And so I follow my curiosity. It’s led me to have a vary unique life and that has been a blessing.

This is why I like being a foreigner. When you are a foreigner, you don’t get called strange as much, and people generally give you more leeway to have different ideas. People actually listen to what I have to say out of curiosity because they KNOW I’ve had different experiences than them, unlike in my home country where everyone assumes that I have a similar culture to them just because we look the same or speak the same
languages or come from the same part of the country.

I would like to think I’m pretty good at understanding other people, perhaps I’m not but let’s say I am. If I am, it’s because I learned that skill out of self preservation. I had to be able to identify open minded people and people who might take advantage of me or try to knock me down because I was verbally abused and knocked down more times than I can count. I haven’t faced that much at all the past 10-15 years, because I learned how to manage my relationships and i know very well what topics I should be more careful about with which people.

I’m not playing the victim here, these experiences have made me even more unique, to the point where I’m irreplaceable. There may be others who can think what I think and do what I do, but I’m 100% sure that no one will be able to nail my unique combination, short of maybe GPT 6 or 7.

I’ve also learned that if I understand myself and other people well enough, I can find ways to explain myself that lead people to see me as something other than weird.

If I can see myself in the other person, especially in their potential to be judgmental towards me, I can often find a way to share myself in a way that feels more familiar to them and they will no longer label me as something “crazy” or “naive” or even “dangerous.

None of this is done for manipulation, it’s done in order to create understanding, to work around peoples biases and show them a version of myself that they can understand. They don’t have to like it, but more often than not, they do.

The typical western response to this is “who cares what people think! Be yourself!” That is very easy to say when you’ve never suffered consequences for the way you express things. It’s easy to say when your nature itself isn’t labeled a “disorder”. When you ask questions that threaten people, they may attack you. I ask those questions without even thinking about it, and so I’ve learned to be very careful about what I share and what I keep to myself.

This blog (and my closer relationships) has been the one place that feels relatively safe. People are incentivized to be nice here and so the haters just kind of ignore me. I also now speak in a way that is not as alienating to people, something I’ve finally gotten a pretty good grip of, especially after writing blogs for 5 years.

I want to go more into the concepts of fame and attention and what shape that fear has taken but this is already a bit much for me right now. I’ve exposed myself even more than I’m accustomed to and this is getting pretty long.

I also have a post I wrote already about what inspired me to write my novel series, and that gets even more personal than this, so I guess I’m making progress. Perhaps this is a new me, one that has finally found a way to share the unshareable 😆

❤️ love you all

Also: I submitted my newest novel Confessions of the Damaged 1.3 to the shops. It should be up within 48 hours. The plan was to release it on 3/30 but I pushed the wrong button so it comes sooner. Confessions of the Damaged 1.1 and 1.2 can be found on multiple platforms including Amazon, Apple and Kobo.

Here’s another preview of 1.3’s beautiful cover by Will Ak: