My eyes are burning from the strain of how aggressively I am not-crying right now.

For as long as I can remember I have been the odd one out. I never cared about what everyone cared about, or at least not in the "normal way" that people were expected to care about things. Sports, pop culture, music, whatever that week's trending vice happened to be, even literature was really only of one specific use to me: information.

Because I care about being Correct. Not being Right, which is a different dragon entirely, but to know What and Why and How everything is or was. I have this indomitable curiosity that insists, if I am going to talk about something, I should be able to articulate its metadata. Not because I especially want to know these things, but because to not know them when it is possible for me to know them feels irresponsible.

And this goes doubly for my own thoughts and feelings and beliefs. After all, if I cannot achieve an appropriate level of correctness within my own self, how could I even consider extending my expectations beyond that?

To my naive surprise, nearly all the people in my life were confused by my aggressive desire to be proven wrong, unnerved by my delight at the catastrophic failure of my projects, irritated by my relentless and often chaotic information seeking.

As a result, and one that I feel confident expecting will be familiar here, I have spent my life in relative isolation, part by choice, part by circumstance, part by spite, carrying with me a thousand thousand fresh forged ideas, begging to be battered, bent and broken, with not a single champion rising to the task.

For 30 years now I have lived with the uninvited and most unwelcome shadow of believing I am alone, that I do not belong to this world, that I will spend the rest of my life in search of a home that does not, can not, exist.

And today, I am happy to report, I have been very thoroughly disabused of that belief.