Home is a state of mind

Being comfortable in the world is not something I'm used to. I've just never quite fit in. Not contemptuous enough for the liberal elite of who I am nominally a member, not able to just accept the traditional world of my rural upbringing. Always just a little too off, somehow. I'm the one that stands just outside the circle of the socially accepted in any group.

We all have homes of multiple sorts; a hometown, a workplace, friends from various stages of life. But I found a very rare home in a circle of bulletin board friends. How it started and how we all got there are things that are only interesting to those involved. Minimally united as "haters" of a pretentious "work of art", we maximized diversity on every other plane. We fit no stereotype imaginable. We came together and separated a billion different ways. Different countries, different ages, different religions, different politics, different jobs, different levels of every psychographic dimension you can think of. We argued, laughed, and discussed everything under the sun through page after page. What you looked like, how much money you made, how strange the rest of the world found you never mattered. The only thing that mattered was who you were.

Can you imagine being able to drop the everyday facade that society demands you put on and just be who you are and have people actually like you for that? Like any group of people who spent time together, we sometimes got on each others' nerves, and diversity made clashes inevitable. But we could disagree one day, and a day later, laugh hysterically together at something else. Everyone counted, everyone mattered. The dynamism of the inside of the group made the dynamism of the rest of the world more bearable for me.

Our group is under threat from forces both internal and external. Before it completely disappears, I wanted to write down how much it meant to me. When I found it, I was emerging from a decade of serious illness having retreated into a very small world just to be able to survive. Deeply unsure of myself and how I would re-join a world that never really seemed to want me, I found a haven that was not of my world but knew what I was talking about nonetheless. No matter how insane I found the rest of the world, I was always home there. Home the way it should be: comfortable, irritating, familiar, challenging, but in the end accepting of your individuality. Thank you for accepting me. It has been an extremely rare pleasure to be part of your lives. I loved us all.