Clown

I'll be your clown. 

I asked myself whether being laughed at was bullying. The feeling of being diminished, lesser, wrong, would support that theory. I talked to you tonight and you made me feel some peace, as if inevitably I had to accept sooner or later that it was easy to laugh at my awkwardness, that it was there and it was not going away because it is part of my wiring. And if the wiring changes I'd probably become someone else.

I think from my happenings while growing up and what I saw on TV, I learned that being different is bad to some extent, because you are going to get flack for it. I learned this the hard way in P.E. in year 9 and 10 where I was bullied most out of any other classes at high school, because I wasn't very fit and had circumstantially inappropriate (gay comes to mind) mannerisms. I just felt bad back then, and I remember trying to change the way I acted, trying to, for example, lessen the emotionality of my voice and gestures (if that is such a thing) and to degay my hand movements. I don't know how far it worked because I stopped consciously doing it after feeling it was too hard. After a few years, I stopped bothering much to change.

I've always been conscious that I was different, just not to what extent. But more and more I have been recently becoming aware that I'm different in a large amount of outward ways, in addition to those partially-concealable inner ways. My difference is visible in the way I move and talk. And I don't mind that so much, except it is often emphasised. I think I perhaps hold 'special' (not necessarily in an egotistic way) places in the lives of those who know me because I am different, because I offer to them something that they do not get from other people. Which is cool. Celebrate difference, yo.

I feel like the clown. The clown is aware he's making a fool of himself in order to make others laugh. I'm a different clown then because I'm not always aware of it, but people still laugh. You said it was easier to laugh at how I act because it's more noticeable. And it's not bad that it is so. I get a guaranteed reaction, in some way. And I will perhaps be more memorable because of my outward awkwardness.

It's tempting to think I'm helping them in some way, like it's good to make others laugh through my actions. Perhaps it takes their mind off of things. After all, I'm not losing anything by acting the way I do. It's just my ego that's bruised, and that's nothing. It is only my image of 'normal' that I think I represent that is diminished. I'm not 'normal'. I don't know what normal is, but different is how I feel. And perhaps belonging to the crowd just never was for me. Clowns are never part of the crowd, though they do find themselves among them. Some people are scared of clowns. Some imagine clowns will come kill them. I could fulfill any of those roles to varying degrees, in someone's mind. Offtopic.

I can't change it. I have to learn what I did not learn during P.E. Might as well make someone else smile in the doing. I hope soon to join in.