Best years of our lives? For me, teen years were start of feeling like alien

By David McElroy · August 11, 2012

We are strangers, we are aliens
We are not of this world
— “Not of This World,” Petra

Every time I observe groups of teen-agers interact, I’m reminded of why I disliked that period of my life so much. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like an alien on this planet, but there was something about those years that made it seem more acute and more painful. It was the start of realizing just how different I am.

For some teens, there’s a casualness to their social interaction that I never felt. I eventually learned to fake it well, but I never quit feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

By high school, I had leadership roles at church and at school, but I never lost the feeling that I was an actor playing a part when I was with others — like some kind of alien wearing a disguise as a human. It was then that I realized I never felt as alone as I did in crowds.

I was thinking about this again Friday night because of sitting in a restaurant watching a group of teens interact. There’s a part of me that wants to say that they made me uncomfortable with the forced casualness of their time together, but there’s another part of me that wonders if they really are casual and natural together — and it’s the fact that they can do that so easily with random people that makes me uncomfortable — because I can’t.

Maybe it makes me feel this way because it reminds me of just how different I felt as a teen — and how I’ve continued to feel like the alien who’s pretending to fit in here.

I’ve talked recently about how I sometimes feel as though there’s a subtle (or not-so-subtle) conspiracy to turn me into a misanthrope. It’s not that I feel better than anybody else, so it’s not a matter of superiority. It’s more about feeling that I’m not from here — and that I’m not really human. So many of my thoughts and feelings just don’t fit with other people. They don’t like me and I don’t like them.

The people I find myself loving and liking are those who are similarly different — others who feel like aliens in their own worlds and family, people who feel as though they’re alone in the crowd, too. I rarely find those people — at least the ones who feel it with the intensity that I do — but I feel strongly drawn to them, as though we share the experience of being among the very few alien oddballs living among the humans.

I know my feelings aren’t unique. Artists and philosophers and just plain weird folks have felt throughout history as though they didn’t belong. But the fact that many others have gone through the same experiences of feeling alone and alien doesn’t make my own feelings any less intense. It doesn’t make me feel as though I really fit.

It’s not that I see other people as being wrong to be what they are. It’s just that they’re different from me. They don’t understand me and I struggle to understand them. I crave my own kind, but they’re few and far between.

I frequently hear people wishing to return to their teen years — calling them the best years of their lives — but I can’t fathom feeling that way. Those were the worst years of my life. The older I get and the better I understand myself, the better my life gets. The years of middle school, high school and college are years I’m happy to leave behind me.

Today, I’m at peace with the fact that I’m an alien among humans — metaphorically speaking, anyway — and I’ve quit worrying about trying to be like them or trying to get them to understand me. I just need somebody who’s “wired up” as I am to share my life of alienness. Then the aloneness wouldn’t feel quite so alone.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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