Half Here, Half Elsewhere

I can’t remember when it started feeling like I was slightly out of step with everything. It had probably been there for years before I understood that other people didn’t feel it too. As a child, I only knew that everyone else appeared to know things I had to work out manually, usually long after the moment had passed. Relying on common sense sounds reasonable until you realise you’re nine years old and apparently assembling yours from spare parts.

It shows up most clearly in ordinary moments. People talk, laugh and answer, and somehow none of it seems to require the amount of thought I put into it. I’m usually a few seconds behind, trying to find the right words before the wrong ones get out first. I pause and rephrase, adjusting myself in real time so I sound less intense, less strange, less likely to make the other person regret asking. I still misjudge it sometimes, obviously, but I’ve become fairly good at hiding the parts of me people don’t seem to know what to do with. When I fail, they often react as though I’ve broken some rule everyone else agreed on before I arrived.

The annoying thing is that hiding does work. Not forever, because I’m still unfortunately myself, but long enough to teach me the lesson. If I speak less and keep the stranger parts under control, people are usually kinder to me. Or at least less visibly tired.

At some point, I started picking other people apart too. I’d listen to an answer and get stuck on the way they said one word, or notice that they seemed slightly less warm than they had five minutes ago. That alone could be enough. The whole conversation would start feeling different, and I’d assume everyone else knew why except me. It isn’t always fear that I’ve made things strange. A lot of the time, it’s the sense that something strange is already happening and I’m the only one expected to pretend otherwise.

Sometimes I have nothing. No strange look, no cruel sentence, no real reason to react. Everything can be exactly as it was a minute earlier, except now it feels wrong. I can remind myself that nothing has happened, which is reassuring until my mind decides that the absence of anything obvious is precisely what makes it suspicious. There’s no fact I can point to and no explanation I can justify, only the feeling that I’ve missed something important and will eventually feel stupid for not recognising it sooner.

That’s when the distance starts to feel internal too. Not just between me and other people, but between me and my own sense of what’s happening. Trying to explain it only makes things worse, because then I have to turn a feeling I don’t fully trust into something I’m expected to account for. Everyone else seems to have some sort of internal compass that mostly works. Mine keeps spinning and apparently expects me to navigate anyway.

When everything inside me feels that uncertain, familiarity becomes something to hold on to. I return to routines I know by heart and whatever small parts of myself still feel recognisable, hoping they’ll make everything outside me feel more manageable. They rarely do for long. I’m lonely, obviously, but the word feels too ordinary for what I mean. Loneliness sounds like missing people. This feels more like missing the world itself, close enough to see it happening and understand what I’m shut out of, but never close enough to believe there’s a place for me in it.

The worst part is that none of this comes from wanting to be alone. I want to be understood without having to translate myself first or soften everything into a version that’s easier to receive. But closeness means being seen in more detail, and detail has rarely felt especially safe. The more someone knows me, the more there is for them to misunderstand. Even something harmless can suddenly require an explanation I’ll give badly while already wishing I’d kept quiet. I want people to come closer. I’m just afraid they’ll change their mind once they see enough.

I’m still hoping there’s somewhere I can be without immediately feeling like I should apologise for taking up space. I keep thinking it shouldn’t be this difficult just to feel wanted somewhere. Other people seem to settle into each other’s lives without thinking about it. I never really have.

I spend a lot of time wondering who I might’ve been if so much of me hadn’t gone into making sense of things that apparently weren’t supposed to be this difficult. Not even the important things, but small exchanges I could’ve lived through once instead of carrying them home and taking them apart for hours, or friendships I might’ve trusted without feeling as though everyone else had been told how this worked and I hadn’t. Sometimes I wonder how much of me never really got a chance. Maybe I would’ve been happier, less afraid, more successful, or simply more certain of myself. I’ll never know now. Other people got to discover themselves; I was mostly trying not to become someone nobody could tolerate.

I assumed this would get easier as I got older. I thought I’d calm down somehow and stop finding normal things so exhausting. I couldn’t tell you exactly when I stopped expecting that. I just kept getting older, and it kept being hard. By the time I realised there wasn’t going to be some better version of me waiting on the other side of it, I’d spent years treating the person I already was like a temporary problem.

Some part of me has kept holding on, though I’ve never known what to call it. Resilience sounds far more deliberate than it has ever felt. Most of the time, I’ve just continued existing because the next day arrived and, somehow, so did I. There are days when being here is the only thing I can offer myself. It isn’t hopeful in any beautiful sense. It just means I haven’t disappeared yet.

Every now and then, something ordinary seems to turn toward me. The moon feels too bright to be impersonal. The trees move as though they’re responding to a thought I never said out loud. A coincidence arrives with such precise timing that calling it random feels almost dishonest. I know this is the sort of meaning other people are careful not to assign. I try to be careful too. But when I usually feel so far from everything, it’s hard not to hold on when something briefly seems to recognise me.

Living with schizotypal personality disorder means never being entirely sure I’m standing on the same ground as everyone else. Everything can feel full of meaning one moment and completely inaccessible the next. Sometimes I experience a kind of depth other people might miss. Sometimes I’d happily exchange all of it for the ability to trust what’s in front of me. I want to believe this way of seeing has given me something. I also know how much it has taken.

I’d like to say I’m learning to live in my own way, but that suggests more certainty than I have. Most of the time, I’m still guessing and hoping repetition eventually starts to resemble stability. Some days feel softer, though I’m never sure whether life has become kinder or I’ve just learned where not to press. I can explain myself better than I used to. I don’t know if that means I’m healing or simply becoming fluent in something I never wanted to live with. For now, the difference remains unclear.

Maybe healing has less to do with becoming better and more to do with no longer abandoning every part of myself that made other people uncomfortable. I’m trying to give those parts somewhere to exist, even if the space is small and I still don’t entirely want them there. I’m not sure that counts as healing. It may only be the closest thing I’ve managed.

I don’t know if this distance can ever be rewritten out of me. It’s followed me for too long and settled too deeply.

I’ve made a life at the edge of things because there was nowhere else to put it.

I just wish I felt less like a witness to my own life.