When your health needs work, you see a Doctor.

When your teeth need work, you see a dentist.

When your car needs work, you see a mechanic.

But who do you see when you need work?

Not your health, your skills, or even your behaviour. Just you. What do you do when the world tells you that you’re broken?

I am slow, my brain does strange things, I overthink, I get anxious, most of the time I’ve got no motivation. On some days when I do have motivation, I have too much, I can’t point it in the right direction, and I spend all my time working on something that isn’t important, or turns out to be pointless. Sometimes I can’t pick things up, other times I can’t put them down.

It seems like I shouldn’t be in control of own life… But I don’t like it when I’m not. I work best with deadlines even though I hate them, and I like being flexible even though its not good for me. I crave instructions, but hate people telling me what to do. Things I am supposed to care about slip my mind, unless someone else constantly reminds me. I have minor control issues and a severe lack of social skills and basic conversational awareness. It took me until I was 25 to realise that a conversation actually requires me to engage with the other person, rather than just sitting there and answering questions like a socially awkward vending machine. It was also about then that I realised that I was control freak. But only because somebody else pointed it out.

The first time I did a personality test, and looked at my results, I was offended.

I’m rather disagreeable, and have severe introverted tendencies. I am highly neurotic and have a remarkably low level of contentiousness. I am prone to depression, and have erratic hormones. I tend to be highly sensitive, and more than slightly cynical. I struggle with a variety of bad behaviours that have wrecked havoc on my brain, and seem to have some deep rooted fear of living an ordinary normal life. My only savings graces (apart from God and long suffering family members) perhaps are my creativity, problem solving skills and sense of humour.

All this means is that I tend not to fit into normal ordinary things. And I usually don’t want to.
As a child I enjoyed being different, it was something like a mark of pride. And even if occasionally things got a bit difficult, I mostly just shook it off, though only after hiding somewhere and crying for a while. But then, the years ticked by and adulthood and real life responsibilities crept up behind me and whacked me in the back of the head. I slowly, ever so slowly, came to realise that all my quirks, when they get out of control, combine to make me a person who wasn’t very good at doing normal, basic things. Things like having a conversation, getting a job or being awake during acceptable hours. I am exceedingly grateful that I’ve never lived alone or else I might have simply melted into a puddle in the corner somewhere.

What do you do when you don’t fit the world? When all the holes around you are circular but you have corners?

Most advice comes in the varying flavours of “just get over it”. Most people aren’t in the privileged position to be able to choose what they do in life, to any great degree. And this blunt advice has merit. You need to eat, you need to pay for your house, your pets and your family. What do you do? You get the best paying job that you can afford and hope you don’t hate it.
Lazy? Get over it. Wake up at midday? Just go to bed earlier. Depressed? Just smile anyway.
But what if you can’t? What if you can’t just do what everybody else seems to be able to manage? You push the start button, but nothing happens. What if you’re broken?

I don’t have an answer to this question. Life is rarely so accommodating. Most likely I’ll end up with some dead-end job handed to me by a friend, sleep in someone’s basement or spend most of my life in the welfare cesspool with the whole world telling me I’m worthless. But maybe, if God is with with me, I’ll be able to find one of those illusive square holes to put myself in, or somehow manage to dig my own.

The last option of course, is to cut bits off. Rearrange things, and move things about. Cut off the corners and the bits that don’t look normal, until you can squeeze yourself into one of the round holes, like everybody else… But I’d rather not have to do that, if I can avoid it. I actually like my corners, though sometimes they get in the way.

If I can only figure out how to work with them, I might find a place where I can actually fit, while being myself.

Sometimes the world needs corners.

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