When you're wired differently you see things from an uncommon perspective. It's why people like me are unable to join in groups and behave like others, and why we're often made to suffer because of it. The herd demands uniformity and obedience to their demands, and from their persepctive when you don't fit in or obey them, you have to be corrected and punished.
The tragedy is that you're really no different from anyone in the herd, except that you don't need or want to be part of the herd. You're fine on your own. Your crime, if you want to call it that, is that through your independence you make the herd see that the herd isn't necessary. That is in their view unforgivable.
I came to the realization that I've tolerated the herd's bullying for much of my life because I regarded myself as defective -- as missing something important that everyone else has. This need to herd, to be part of something bigger and (questionably) better than myself. Only recently did I come to see clearly that I'm fine the way I am. The herd is also fine the way they are. I simply choose to follow my own path alone. How they regard that -- and me -- is their problem, not mine.
Slowly I came to a truth that I never faced: I have never been lonely being true to myself. Trying to fit in is what made me lonely, because my differences were enough to make me unacceptable to the herd (and yet they still expected me to join them and put up with their bullying.) It is, in fact, very lonely being the only one in a herd who doesn't belong there.
This doesn't sound like an enormous revelation, but for me it was. After a lifetime of being a victim of the herd, of trying and failing to give them what they want, and being punished and bullied and being made a virtual outcast because I literally can't fit in, I love my solitude. Because I accept it now instead of seeing myself as defective, being alone is the most relaxing state of happiness I know. If you're the same, and you're still struggling to fit in, my advice is to stop. That is not your place in this life. Find the place you love, and that allows you to be who you are.
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