Square in a round world

Have you ever felt like you don’t fit in? Not just in a common everyday sense when you’re among strangers or an unusual place, I’m talking about something deeper. It’s that feeling you had when you were 8 years old in a busy street, looking for your parents. You walk aimlessly searching, trying to see through the cracks between people who slide by and don’t notice you. You think you see them, but then the crack closes… more people slide by… and then they aren’t there. The more you search, the more you realise… you’re helpless and can’t help yourself.

Or the feeling you get when you’re stuck in the turnstile… we’ve surely all been there… everybody else slipping through without any worries, occasionally throwing a sidelong glance at the person who just doesn’t quite figure it out. You know you’re missing something important, but can’t for the life of you figure out what it is.

You’re a square in a round world. You’re the stone that gets trapped in the sieve while the sand falls through. You’re the guy with the ‘kick me’ sign on his back, wondering why everyone keeps kicking him. You’re the nerd, you’re the loner, the guy that sits at the back of the bus and wishes he could sit with the others. The last guy picked for the team and the first to leave the party. The person that joins a conversation just a little too late and just can’t figure out what the others are talking about… You’re the tall guy with the long neck… In a colony of penguins, you are the walrus.

Something implacable is somehow hiding just out of your view, like the back of your head - you just can’t see it, even though you know it’s there. You live your life with a pane of glass between you and the real world, and like a goldfish screaming to the outside world, they can’t hear you. Sometimes it’s like they don’t even know you’re there.

You’re everybody’s imaginary friend, something everyone else sees but no deeper than spilled water. You aren’t a real person because you’re missing something as important as life itself. Like Pinocchio, you wish you could be like everybody else.

I feel like that sometimes. I feel like that now, for reason’s I know but can never quite explain. Obviously I exaggerate to make the picture clear. But I wonder if I really am missing something, if I am living life with a plank in my eye, unable to see it with everyone else sniggering behind my back but unwilling to tell me about it. And of course, I can track down in my foggy memory of the past all the reasons why I feel that way. I was the geek, I was the loner. Some words cut deeper into the soul, and the wounds last longer than we think.

We are to love others as we love ourselves, but what if we don’t love our self? I don’t have a problem with me, in fact I quite like who I’ve become, but I wonder if other people do. It’s probably me being silly, for I know my heart and there’s little I can see in it that is repulsive. But I always think of the back of my head, the figure dancing just behind you whichever way you turn – we can’t see ourselves for what we truly are. We look out through our eyes and all we ever see is our reflection.

We are reflected in our friends, we glisten back from the rocks of our family, we echo through the chambers of our acquaintances. It’s like seeing your own face reflected from a rippling stream, never constant, always changing, never staying still enough to really see it clearly.

I’m glad God sees me clearly, and I know I can trust Him. In fact, He seems like the only constant thing in this round world sometimes. He loves people regardless; He has room for circles, and room for squares. And I think when we get to heaven, we’ll see that we are not just squares and circles, but shapes more beautiful than our goldfish-minds can yet imagine.