The Silent Pain of An Outsider

What it feels like to be an outsider, and the unseen pain of invisibility

Photo Taken By Clara Thierry

Being an outsider feels like being somewhere without being present. You watch, internalise, and observe every nuance, while people barely notice you. Your close friends give you a quick glance to check on you, until they don’t.​

In those moments, you feel at first small, then just unnecessary. You start to numb your true self that wants to scream and be seen. So, you swallow your pain in silence, you close off and retreat into your shell.

You keep putting distance between you and the crowd, and it keeps growing until it becomes out of control, until it is too late, and you become completely extracted from the place.​

You do so because one day at the wrong time, you wanted to show the world your difference, your sensibility. You did it clumsily to people who were not yet mature, and you learned that showing your true self could lead to rejection, to so much pain that you decided to shut down and build huge malls, preventing you from being yourself again.​

You become this comforting plant, invisible, full of emotions that overflow, but yet you remain still, and it’s like everything is moving around you, except you. And the pain you feel at that time seems unbearable.​

I actually often felt this pain. I would wake up the morning after a big party, a party in which I was invisible, in which I refrained from being me, in which I swallowed all the pain and tried to channel it through cigarettes and alcohol. The more I smoked, the more I would be alone, and the more I was waiting for someone to notice me, to notice especially what was going on inside me, and the more I was excluding myself from the place. I was maybe waiting for my saviour, until he or she never arrived.​

I would wake up 5 hours later, and try to find food to offset the bad taste the cigarette I was about to smoke would give me because I had smoked too much the night before, and my throat was nothing but a chimney. Each time I would feel this pain, I would smoke, and the more I smoked, the more the pain would grow.

It was like I was trapped in my body, in my thoughts, and I could not go away from them. I had forgotten why I was even so closed off in the beginning.​

Today, I would eventually let my true self express itself, but from time to time, my old demons would come back, and I would swallow some words because I forgot how to express them, or because I never got the chance to use them.