Brewer Alex - The Misfits Manifesto

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Copyright 2017 by Lidia Yuknavitch

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2006-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-2007-7 (ebook)

If anyone has ever made you feel like you were nothing, then this book is for you

Misfit.

Trust me when I say there is a lot packed into that little word.

First let me tell you what it doesnt mean. Im not talking about how we all, on occasion, feel weird, or lonely, or exhausted, or like a failure, or left out. Everyone feels those things sometimes. Thats the human default. Im not talking about feeling out of place or awkward. Im not talking about chafing against social roles, or losing ones way, or midlife crises, though all those states of being are important and worth honoring.

There are so very many ways to define the word misfit . Most of the definitions out there involve some version of the following: a person who is different from other people and who does not seem to belong in a particular group or situation, or someone or something that fits badly, or a person who is poorly adapted to a new situation or environment.

The first definition for misfit on Urban Dictionary goes like this:

Basically, an individual. In the school social classes of today, a misfit doesnt fit into any one clique quite right, not even the outcasts, but may have qualities of each one. True misfits usually do not believe they fit categories like emo or goth, and they are often introverts. Misfits tend to follow their own beliefs, and are usually persecuted for it. Misfits tend to be outcast for no reason, have few good friends, and are usually intelligent and mature, and sometimes sort of insane and depressed, and nearly always creative beyond measure. Misfits tend not to care about their bad social lives, but some do.

That quiet, depressed girl over there is a misfit .

Others might say that the artist with the blue hair in the corner is a misfit.

That computer nerd building his own time machine in his basement is a misfit.

That guy wearing the anarchist jacket, he plays guitar and wont talk to anyone. Hes a misfit.

#misfit #outcast #social class #school #individual

When I say misfit , Im talking about the fact that some of us just never found a way to fit in at all , from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense. Im talking about how some of us experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly cant make it in life. We serially flounder, or worse, we drown in our inabilities or mistakes, or even worsesince Im old enough to understand that sometimes some of us dont make it at allwe give up. Love and peace to the star stuff that carries those misfits we have lost too soon.

But Im not here to draw pity.

Misfits, from my point of view, are everything. The world needs us.

Here is the story of why.

Id say Im a misfit partly because of things that happened to me, and partly from things that come from the inside out. Hardwiring, if you will.

You see, some of us do life weird or wrong, or we do weird or wrong things in life. Some of us flunk out or go to jail or rehab or lose husbands or wives or children or houses or all the money. But the thing is, we dont all surrender or disappear, though some of us do. Lost secular angels. Some of us manage to invent bodies, voices, and lives worth living even though we dont fit in to the normative socius.

In our present tense, the older I get, the more I think that the social scripts we inherit along the way telling us who to be and how to fit in are bunk. The best we seem able to do is barely navigate those scripts, usually badly, like a bunch of mammals using their oars backward.

In fact, when I talk about misfittery, what I hear most often is oh, everyone is a misfit. And I know what people mean. In some ways, we all want to kind of claim the space of misfit, because lets face it, life is hard and weird and unfair and everyone, no exceptions, gets dosed once in a while. While I understand what people mean when they say that, I also think there is something important that only some of us have experienced that might help the rest of us get by, if our stories could be amplified.

I also understand the anti-label contingent. But I want to talk about the ways in which stepping into my misfittery, standing up inside it, and understanding it as a way of being and seeing in the world, saved my goddamn life.

Some of us have a point of view forged from both our experiences as well as our continued inability to enter culture, relationships, language, and social organizationthe way we group ourselves in relationships, families, and communitieslike other people. And there are a lot of us. Legions of us. For once Id like to tell the story from our point of view, rather than from the projections and categories and DSM designations and false fictions society has made of us. The fallen, the broken, the abused, the recovering, the ex-cons, the vets, the survivors, the introverted, the not quite right: We are not your enemy. We are not something to be embarrassed about. We are not lesser or failed.

If you are a misfit, my hope is that you will see yourself reflected in these pagesfrom my story and the story of our fellow misfits. Ive spoken with people who have figured out how to stand up inside their different ways of doing things, at the edges of culture. I hope to remind you that the edges of culture are exactly where new and beautiful meanings are generated. The edges help hold the center together. The edges are frontiers. The stories from other misfits in this book are here alongside mine to remind us all that we are not alone. We are always a part of one anotherjust like a conglomerate rock carrying sediments of earth from all over the world.

If you do not identify as a misfit, my hope is to illuminate the vital lessons we misfits have to share. We live in your periphery, right next to you every day of your life. We have ideas and innovations and heart to lend, but youd have to learn to see us differently, on our own terms, and well all have to ask ourselves how do our stories forge useful tributaries that might contribute to the human community?