To Stand at the Edge & Claim It as Central
The very first thing you learn about yourself is that you are different. You've always known it. The glint in your eyes when you are absorbed into a world others find mundane, your passionate curiosity to wonder and search for meaning, your constant yearning for depths and your persistent restlessness are evidence.
While you have known this about yourself, you also know something else: your immediate urge to trim yourself into sizes that fit into different spaces—an existential urge to be seen as normal, to be acceptable, to behave like others, not to be comfortable with your silence, and to want what everyone thinks is glorious. To aspire for the sake of aspirations, to do things soullessly. You have always thought that maybe, just maybe, what you have isn't good enough—your ideas, your thoughts, and your weird obsessions. So, like others, you live in the center.
Despite your cowardice, you have always been drawn to the awkward, misfits, the daring, the bold, the rebellious, the contrarian ideas, and the counterintuitive approaches.
For so long, you have always wanted to write in a certain way—to bend language, to write formlessly, to write abstractly, ferociously, angrily. To break words. At certain. Unexpected places. To experiment with very long, tortuous sentence that stretches unreasonably while saying one thing that would have been said simpler with fewer words without being dragged obsessively to make a point but choosing to stop right at where it needed to have stopped some while ago.
For all you know, you have always wanted to be different—to think differently, to write differently, to aspire differently, and to do the things that set your soul on fire. But most times, you find yourself shrinking into normalcy. You morph into a being that is so afraid of change because you know it took you so long to become who you are—the acceptable version of yourself. So you want to remain that way. Reimagining a new identity is hard work. So, you choose to accept whatever is mainstream. You begin to move with the crowd—to write like the crowd, to think like the crowd. You begin to accept popular ideas. You begin to adapt to popular conceptions of what reality is, even when those are not your reality.
But one day, it all ends. You wake up, and you are exhausted from pretending to like the central idea. You wake up, and you decide that you are tired of wearing this mask you've been forced to wear all your life. You decide you're tired of taking the safe path, the worn-out road. You decide to start moving away from others, into yourself.
Because for so long, you've been scared of existing at the fringes, at the border. But now, you find yourself stepping back. Each day, you find yourself moving toward the boundary of what you have been told is impossible. You find yourself moving toward the dream you were once cautioned to let go of. You begin to tilt toward the edge of everything you have been told to accept as normal. You keep moving, gently and gently. You are scared, yet you realize that to remain sane, you must migrate. And so, your mind insists on this exodus. With great pain, you keep moving to the edge of the center. You gradually return back into yourself.
Soon, you now stand at the edge, at the border. You begin to cuddle your insecurities and tame your fears. You begin to convince yourself that you matter. You begin to believe in your own dreams. You begin to accept your awkward aspirations. You begin to like the shape of your thoughts and learn that your distinctiveness is one of the beautiful things about you.
And as you begin to reclaim yourself, your stories, and your ambitions, the world begins to adjust too. The world start moving towards you too. They begin to notice the difference. They all start taking note of the outlier existing at the edge. And soon, they are gravitating towards you and admiring your resolve to be bold, to be daring, to exist at the edge. For while they lived in the center, they have always wanted to exist at the edge too. So, from you, they begin to learn courage.
Many begin to move out of the center too. Because you dared to dream differently, you inadvertently give others permission to dream differently too.
Your stories, your thoughts, and your somebodiness now become your center, and the whole world begin to move towards you.
And every day, you decide to stand at the edge and claim it as a center. Because you have learned that there is freedom to be found at the margin. You no longer see it as a disadvantaged position. You begin to learn the immense proportion of creative ideas that exist at the fringes of reality and perception. Every day, you begin to investigate your desires. You now hold your aspirations with skepticism.
And, like Toni Morrison, you are no longer worried about the deviant nature of your writing. Now, you hold onto the conviction that “you can stand at the border and claim it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where you are.” You are no longer looking for “valid” stories to tell. You are no longer obsessed with being what is deemed appropriate. You are no longer clipping those parts of you that want to blossom. You are no longer scared of how the world will perceive you, your art, and your individuality. You are now comfortable existing at the fringes of common practice and asking the world to come to you.
You still have little worries, though. You are still worried that you may be alone. You are worried that you may be wrong. What if your thoughts and your ideas are not different, just stupid?
But you're convinced that your reality cannot be a stupid agenda. You are beginning to ask yourself questions because to exist at the border is to exist in oneself. It is to fully accept oneself with all its quirks and awkwardness.
Despite your worries, you know that soon, you will no longer be scared of accepting the aspects of yourself that you have repressed for a long time and deemed unworthy of being written about or shared with the world. You will learn that your experiences and everything that has shaped you to this moment are one great conspiracy that the world needs to know about. It will take time, but you will learn that the world is hungry to learn your secrets, your stories, your struggles, and everything that has shaped your personhood.
And with this new freedom comes the result you have always wanted. You begin to see the liberating power of authenticity, and you naturally evolve into your individual style and distinctness.
You begin to introduce the world to a certain kind of wonder. Your stories begin to explore a certain kind of depth that no one has ever felt or dared to fall into before. You now stand firmly, accepting your idiosyncrasies and shining into the world an awkward but brilliant light. A light they desperately yearn for. A light through which they begin to unravel more about the darkness of the creator’s unexplainable universe.
This light is truly yours, and your dreams are also yours, not some hand-me-downs. Not some inheritance. You are no longer shackled to the center, to the traditional forms. You are no longer compelled to create in a certain way, to write about a certain thing, to speak in a certain form, to express only certain emotions. And because you stand firmly at the border and call it central, you create a magnetic field that pulls everyone into you.
And the world keeps moving, keeps moving towards your light.