There have been many times in my life when I felt off—like the “other” in the room. It showed up in social settings, and it showed up in family ones too. I was simply different, and of course the old fan favorite: weird. I never knew what to do with that growing up. Adulthood has not solved it. Sometimes I ran from it, trying hard to fit in so I would not feel so out of place. Other times I leaned into it and ran with it. Either way, the ending was the same. I was alone again.

Those feelings have grown sharper in the last few years. Socially and politically, I live in a country so split I am no longer sure we will find a middle ground. That is the part that hurts, because I live in the middle. I walk the path between extremes, and that path is getting wider and lonelier by the day.

At first I tried to outrun it. I dove into friendships and rooms I did not fully agree with and told myself to suck it up. It worked for a while. It never lasted. Then I tried to accept the shift I kept feeling: that one side of the culture had moved so far that the old middle started to look like the other side by default. I felt more included there for a stretch. The landmines were just different. Being a Taoist in those rooms is not common, and it is not well understood. I ended up alone again, only with a different set of headlines. That, too, fell apart. Back to the middle. Alone.

I am in a strange spot now. Where I once found at least a few shared points with different camps, those points keep vanishing. I have reached toward “safe” corners—academia, religion, even the fandoms I actually enjoy—and they go flat the same way. I can agree with some of it. There is always one or two things that are a bridge too far, and I walk away. Not because I am itching to convert anyone. These days, trying to convince people comes with its own risks. I have not moved that much in my views. It is just that my views no longer seem to be enough. Saying that out loud is sad on more levels than I like.

So where does that leave me? I could walk away from society and play mountain monk. I could sand down a few of my views and hope it is enough to belong. Or I could try a third thing: make a space for myself and for anyone else who is still out there. The more I look, the fewer of those spaces I see. The ground gets more barren by the day. That route has its own costs, and I am not sure I have the bandwidth given everything else in my life. If there is interest, though, I might try. Readership here is small as blogs go. If this lands, leave a comment. If it somehow blows up, I might dust off an old project. We will see.

For now I will keep walking, looking for a little refuge in the noise. Lao Tzu already named this feeling, more than two thousand years ago: I alone am different from other men, but I value the nursing-mother. The middle is not a committee seat. In the Tao Te Ching it is closer to holding the center—shou zhong—not grabbing either pole and not pretending the poles are imaginary. Water does not campaign. It finds the low place and stays useful.

The middle path is a lonely one. For this half-assed Taoist, it still looks like the only one that is actually mine.