I am not one of us

I don't know if it's just me, but I've never felt quite included.

Technically I am a member of many groups. Not groups like organisations, that's a whole 'nother post subject and one for later, but...demographics. English. Mixed race. Genderqueer. Fantasy geek. Etcetera. I don't deny this. It's obvious.

Yet whenever anyone says 'us', no matter how stirring their speech is, no matter whether I think their sentiments are right or wrong...a little voice inside me says, 'I'm not one of you.'

Not in any insulting way, you understand. Not 'I'm not one of you!' hurled like an insult, defiant and secretly terrified, but simply a statement of face. I'm not one of you. Full stop.

I don't really understand why. It's just been...well, a rock-solid certainty, for as far back as I can remember.

Maybe it's psychological. Something to do with my parents-my mother refusing to admit I was part African, my father refusing to admit I was part English, in the simplified version. Maybe it was because I hated baby dolls and action-men both as a kid, and played instead with plastic animals, narrating long complex stories with my lions and tigers and bears(oh my). I don't know.

All I know is that whatever you are, whatever I am, I am not one of you.

That does not mean I don't sympathise with your problems, or that I think you are Wrong and I am Right, or that I pig-headedly deny that we share a common enemy or friend. All it means is that I am not one of you.

I am not plural. I am me, singular, and that is all.

What that means...I don't know.