counter culture

As a teenager, I was always trying to find the right subculture. I didn't want to be normal, I didn't want anything to do with normal people. I defined myself by my differentiation, and looked for others who did the same. I was always frustrated going to schools where I couldn't find a single person, let alone any kind of group. I wasn't even all that specific, punk, goth, metal, isn't anyone into anything but pop trash?

These weren't just preferences. I discounted literally everyone who seemed too normal. Which was literally everyone. Why should I even attempt any kind of friendship or anything else with normal people? They're boring, dumb, callous and selfish. They have bad taste in everything and all sorts of backwards beliefs and values. I didn't even interact with them. It was obvious.

To some extent, I wasn't wrong. People often lack intelligence, ethics, or good taste, but I went on to discover the same was largely true of all sorts of people. It doesn't matter if they're anarchists or Buddhists or Budweiser loving football fans. Putting people into all these categories wasn't really sorting anything out.

I stopped looking for interesting people. I lost any sense of what I was looking for and felt like I hated all people. I still have some serious grievances with humanity, but it's a hell of a gut punch to realize that I hated people without ever learning anything about them. I saw monsters in all sorts of strangers just trying to live their lives. I didn't get to know anyone but a few partners I've had. Not that I paid enough attention to them, either. 

I knew that I was scared, but couldn't admit how central that was to my problems. I couldn't face what a position of weakness I was working from. I thought it was virtue, being too proud to face reality. 

Humanity didn't do this to me. I did this to myself. Something was wrong with how my brain worked. It wasn't "my fault," per se. I had more serious mental health problems than I do now. It was trauma response. I was protecting myself the only way I knew how. I tried so hard to be self-aware, but these walls I built created massive blind spots.

What do I say to anyone, I'd often struggle with, but never asked them about themselves. I didn't care. They weren't like me, so why bother. Asking them anything would be like asking a chimp what they thought of dialectical materialism. Probably best if I didn't encourage them to keep gibbering at me, right?

I had no idea what dialectical materialism was back then. We all learn, grow, and change, misunderstand and forget. The condescension was weird. I didn't pay enough attention to people to have any sense of how intelligent they were. I didn't try to understand people. They said something I didn't like, and that made them idiots. For the most part, I just assumed, lost in my own world where I understood everything.

I've come to realize that everything is perspective. This aspect of the mindset I'm describing isn't special, but all too common. Most of us think we're right, we laud those who agree with us, and disparage those who see things differently. We fail to understand or even take interest in why others see things differently. We may not even articulate ourselves in ways conducive to understanding each other, only to blame others for failing to understand. Much of this is all too normal. 

In some ways, I'm mortified to realize that I am all too normal. I speak human just fine, albeit frequently too nervous and distractible to be much good at it. The sort of music I listen to doesn't actually matter all that much. I'm human and that is the problem. Our fallibility is legion, but normal people aren't all that bad. They're actually all different, from me and from each other. To some of them, I'm one of the boring normies.