It seems most of us are Outsiders. Freaks. Misfits. Call it what you want. We’ve all been called names because we don’t fit in. Or never felt we did.
Until we discovered comics. Until we discovered books and films. Until we found ourselves immersed in stories about our own pain that cleverly hid the personal stuff in the shrubbery of fantasy or marginally skewed reality.
As I once wrote in a (mostly) defunct blog, I’m a fan of Outsider stories because I’m intensely curious about this, and have always been a big cheerleader of unconventional human beings. I’d like to understand them. Know them. Because understanding them helps me understand myself also. And those closest to me, too, which is a massive bonus.
Us Outsiders actually have a lot more in common than we think. We’ve always felt slightly misjudged, and a wee bit alienated, and loneliness is not a concept we struggle to relate to.
I went the sci-fi/horror/fantasy route as a kid because I was forced to correct a “lazy eye” by wearing a filthy, big eye patch over a pair of gigantic, black glasses. The patch came off only when my head touched the pillow at night. For the first two of those five years, I thought I was hideous. Maybe I was. I was prime Outsider material. I imagine anybody reading this was once or still is.
But, so what! Being a hideous freak, a proud Outsider, was better than being one of the sheep. That’s the thinking I arrived at. From a very early age, I had zero interest in doing what other people did and being what other people wanted me to be. At school, I painted black figures slathered in blood and I put on Dracula plays. I slept in a cardboard coffin now and then and wore plastic vampire fangs that were also soft and totally edible. The vampire stuff got me through childhood.
After a while, I turned the hideous into a positive, I guess. The other option was becoming what others wanted me to be. How many of us have considered that only to come to our senses and reject the very idea of being something we’re not?
In my more positive state where I embraced my freakery and failure to comply, I rooted for the Monster in Frankenstein, I shed tears when Gwangi the dinosaur was defeated courtesy of the stop motion magic of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, and I read Stan Lee’s Marvel editorials feeling like I’d finally landed on an island made for my kind… even if that island was the Island of Doctor Moreau.
Being around and connected to other Outsiders diluted my Outsider’ism, at least to the point where shared passions (and healthy addictions) enriched the day-to-day struggle of being human, of being the shepherd of our authentic selves. Surely that’s where happiness is found. In the acceptance of what we are.
Regular flights of the imagination, be they films, comics, music, novels, poems, games, or whatever lights your personal dynamite stick, are essential, and a world without Misfits would be a world without the creative stuff we love so much.
That’s my first thought for a first column. Bottom line: Nobody is truly alone.
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