Growing up, I never felt like I belonged anywhere.
On the outside, I looked like a normal teenager. On the inside, there was just a blank void. I thought I was born broken, wired for dark thoughts and depression. I assumed I had to carry that weight around for the rest of my life, hoping time would somehow take care of it.
School was a blur. Even when I achieved things, the main feeling was always emptiness. A strange sense of pointlessness I couldn't explain to anyone, so I just shrugged and took the simplest answer: that's just how I was built.
When high school finally ended, I was 19 and ready to leave everything behind. I packed my bags for university and told myself a simple lie: a new place would change me. I expected the move to strip away the emptiness and rewrite who I was. It didn't. The city changed, but the void was there the entire way.
To fill that emptiness of belonging nowhere, I hid behind art. In my head, I built an entire identity around art and culture. I listened to the right albums, watched the right movies, and thought I was dealing with my state.
But it was just an escape.
It's easier to identify with an album or a character on screen than actually building your own identity from scratch. Consumption requires no real effort. It was a comfortable trap that kept me locked in a loop, convinced that being an outsider meant having to live that way.
It took me years to realize that my view of being an outsider was dead wrong. Feeling like an outsider wasn't a curse; my own perspective was the thing holding me down.
Not belonging anywhere wasn't a flaw. I didn't have to fix it or run from it. I could just own it. Nowhere stopped meaning no place for me and started meaning no walls around me.
Once I stopped trying to belong to a particular crowd, I felt strangely free. There was less validation to chase and fewer paths I felt obligated to follow just because they were familiar to everyone else.
Coming from an art background let me dive into technical stuff like coding without feeling like I had anything to lose. I jumped from code to design without worrying about fitting into a traditional job market, because no one expected that from me anyway. That's how I found what actually interested me.
Those lines from André 3000 come from a dark and sad place, but I hear something different in them.
For me, it isn't a loss. It's space.
It's what's left once you cut the symbol off yourself and stop performing for a crowd that was never watching anyway.
I stopped using art as a substitute for having an identity of my own. A man with nothing to prove and no group to please can finally start living.
At 26, I'm finally not in denial. I took the deal. I'm out there in the open, in search of the life juice.
I grew up belonging nowhere. Turns out, that was my place all along.