I have lived on the margins twice in my life, and from the outside I know it looks the same. That’s the strange part. Same distance from the center, same refusal to live the way everyone tells you to live, same sense of standing slightly outside the flow of things, watching instead of participating.
But the first time I ended up there, I was a heroin addict in my teens and twenties, and I did not end up there by accident. People like to turn those years into a story about being lost, but I wasn’t lost. I was in pain, yes, but I was also seeing things I didn’t have the language for yet. I saw how much of life was performance. I saw how people gave their entire lives to climbing ladders they didn’t even like, to buy things they didn’t need, to impress people they didn’t respect. I saw how empty it all felt, how everyone was exhausted and medicated and quietly disappointed. I saw the machine, and I hated it.
But I had no alternative vision. No structure. No God. No real responsibility. No reason to build anything. So when you see through the world and you have nothing solid to stand on, the insight doesn’t make you wise. It just makes you destructive. So I rejected everything. Not gracefully, not thoughtfully. I rejected it by trying to disappear. If nothing matters, then I don’t matter either. That was the logic. It looked like rebellion from the outside, but it was really despair. It was what happens when you see the emptiness but you don’t yet know that there is such a thing as the sacred.
And now I am here again, on the margins, but for completely different reasons. I am still not living the way the mainstream lives. I am homeschooling my children. I am building my days around my home and my family and my health and my faith. I am thinking in decades instead of weekends, in generations instead of promotions. I am still refusing the script. From far away, it probably looks like I just never learned how to fit in.
But this time I am not here because nothing matters. I am here because everything does.
That is the part that is very hard to explain unless you have lived both sides. The first time I rejected the world because I thought it was all empty, so I tried to burn my life down along with it. Now I reject parts of the world because I think life is sacred, and I am trying to build something that will outlive me: children, traditions, a way of living, a family culture, a small piece of order in a very chaotic world.
So yes, I have lived on the margins twice. Same distance from the center, but pointed in completely opposite directions. The first time, I was running toward chaos, toward numbness, toward not existing. This time, I am walking very deliberately toward order, toward responsibility, toward a life that is slow and sometimes repetitive and sometimes exhausting, but very real.
The first time I saw through the world, it made me want to die.
The second time I saw through the world, it made me want to build a life so solid that my children could stand on it.
B🤍
Leave a Reply