Misfit

By: Jackson Hamilton

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

A life as a misfit, in review. The author realizes his status as a misfit, from age three, and eventually accepts it and achieves a degree of peace of mind. His hope is this volume provides the same sort of palliative effect for his reader. No, the experiences won't be the same, but the basic emotions and experiences of being a human (or, as the author puts it, a spiritual being in a physical body) do have some commonality. All men are Noah's sons, goes the line.

Turns out a few others have walked this path of achieving (to some degree) self-awareness before him. The Japanese monk, Baisao, was one:

I
I’m no Buddhist or Taoist
Nor Confucianist either,
I’m a black-faced white-haired
Hard-up old man.
You think I just prowl
The streets selling tea?
I’ve got the whole universe
In this tea caddy of mine.

II
When I left home at ten,
I turned from worldly fame,
Now I’m in my dotage,
A layman once again.
A black bat of a man,
A joke even to myself,
But still the old tea seller
I always was.

III
Seventy years of Zen
I got nowhere at all
I shed my black robe
Became a shaggy crank.
I have no business with
The sacred or profane,
Selling tea is all I do
It holds starvation off.

Baisaō (1675–1763), Japanese Buddhist monk

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It is easier to sail many thousands of miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with 500 men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s own being alone. Henry David Thoreau

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The point I’d like to make here is that although we might assume that misfits are weird, oddball creatures so deviant from the rest of us that they can’t adequately connect with others, the frustrating experience of feeling uncomfortably out of place is well-nigh universal. And that has less to do with our personal peculiarities than being faced with social norms and conventions incompatible with our nature and ideals. In short, on one measure or another—or at one time or another—we’ve all been misfits or outsiders.... Psychology Today, Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D.