Life is Strange sometimes

Life is Strange sometimes

Every life is strange because everyone is a stranger sometimes.

I've always been a stranger and I've always felt as if I'm a foreigner from a country that doesn't exist.  I used to let my alien feelings get to me and I used to try to mold myself to fit in.

But as I've approached middle age, I've figured out that there is no fitting in.  I am who I am and it isn't worth the struggle to pretend I'm something other people want me to be.  And strangely enough, there's something of value in being myself.  There's a strange fragile beauty in who I am that goes beyond my physical unattractiveness and my disastrous social awkwardness.

So I've decided that I am who I am and there's nothing wrong with that.  So I now get through my feelings of strangeness by writing my way through.  Dark spots combine on lighted screens to form tools for digging out from under the weight of unnamed emotions.  They form letters and lines of letters and clumps and clusters of words and meanings and somehow they form a coat of armor and let me touch other people skin to skin at the same time.

I' started this blog to share some of that writing.  Much of it is already out on the web.  It sits orphaned and unseen for the most part and people don't usually see more than a single piece of it.  But certain pieces combine together to form a picture, not of my physical body, but of me, the real me.  They show my flaws and my pain and my heart, things so much more important in the greater scheme of things than images of my epidermis and my hair follicles and the set of my lips over my teeth.

If you want to start a relationship with the real me or even to just try to see through the eyes of a total stranger in a way you haven't before, take this journey with me and read some of me.

Joseph F barber