A personal puzzle.


I hate being part of a group. It's partly the result of being two years younger than my classes starting in Grade 6 (began school when 4 years old -- November birthday -- and skipped Grade 5) and so comprehensively and absolutely unwanted at anything sports-related. But the RDS has been a factor as well, as I've only realized in the last couple of years. I get nothing from winning, but the usual depression from losing, so teams are a lose-lose proposition for me. 


It was also impossible to explain to others why I was never happy at winning. Plus, I am poorly coordinated and suck at anything that requires dexterity. I don't seem to have a right or left handedness -- which means that if I have to do something quickly, I have no default -- I have to think which side to use. That slows me down terribly.


Of course, it occurred to me years later that if I had practiced a lot, it would have turned from a disadvantage into an advantage. But with no reward for getting better, I don't think that I would be able to do that even today.


Anyway, back to groups. I am the utterly ungrouped -- I don't feel part of anything and usually I don't miss it. 


But there is one exception. In films, if there is an "everyone gets together" scene, it always moves me. I mean the sort of scene like the one where everyone cheers Sen when she guesses the riddle correctly about her parents at the end of Spirited Away, or the huge cheer after Elizabeth's "Raise the colors" speech in the third or fourth Pirates of the Caribbean. 


But at the same time.... I don't believe that such things ever do happen. Not to me anyway. 


I am the one who volunteers for guard duty on Christmas Eve. And my feelings about that are very... meta. I wish that I cared, but I don't. It worries me that I don't care. it feels.... bleak.


I've had a recurring... dream? at least an image series for as long as I can remember, perhaps all my life. Every so often it plays again. It's not frightening but quiet and a bit sad.


It's just me in some vast hall full of machinery. I am going from machine to machine, shutting them down. Not destroying or damaging them -- just turning them off and listening to them run down and stop. They are generators or something.... something vast. The whole hall is humming with them when I begin, and it steadily gets quieter and quieter as I shut them off one by one. 


Then I walk to the end of the hall and look back at the machines. There is a feeling of satisfaction, if anything. Of having done a job.


Then I turn out the lights in the hall, and leave. End of sequence. Good night.