Outsider Insight

©2011 Rudolf Helder

A good portion of my life I've been an outsider. It's a position I'm familiar with ever since I moved as a ten year-old from a small village in Holland to the big city: Amsterdam. Playing cowboys and Indians changed abruptly into kissing girls and fighting boys from the street behind mine for territory.
Often there's fighting involved, either physically or mentally, to change one's outsider status to that of insider. In Amsterdam I fought one battle after another, making my mother doubt the wisdom of moving right after my father had died, as she sewed back on buttons some kid had ripped off my shirt.
But what was done couldn't be reversed. I was being called names on the street and made fun of in school for being a farmer's boy, which I wasn't. Tell that to the big city folks who look at anyone not from a big city as having been yanked out of the mud. Stereotypes abound. I fought them all, and increasingly with my tongue, which proved mightier than the proverbial sword, as I found that I could cut down bullies just by making the girls in class laugh. But even that was a delicate dance I found out one day when the class bully knocked over my ink well on purpose after which I punched him in the grimacing face as he turned around to savor the sight of the spill.
"I'll get you for that," he said, the sound muffled by his hands trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose. "At 4."
All afternoon I trembled with fear. At 4pm I reluctantly and sheepishly surveyed the schoolyard from the school's steps. No one was waiting for me, except a skinny girl with glasses I'd barely noticed in class before. She said it was awesome what I had done and we walked direction home together. Turned out she lived in the street behind me, one her hero didn't dare enter without some buddies.
It was only years later that I begun to realize that all my fights had been for acceptance. That was shortly after I had floored a so-called friend in a disco who had the nasty habit of punching me in the stomach whenever I expected it the least. We'd lost track of each other after school, but when he suddenly stood in front of me on the dance floor, flanked by two girls, and stuck his hand out I bypassed it in a reflex and punched him in the gut. Not hard. Just for fun. He went down, turning into a heap of pale skin and awkwardly composited arms and legs. One of the girls snapped, "How could you? He just had a stomach operation!"
Karma's a bitch.
After that incident I changed my ways, at least to some extend. Physical altercations became a thing of the past. Instead I tried to understand others, rather than triumph over them intellectually or otherwise. I've not always been successful and my outspokenness has irked plenty of people who prefer to be treated with gloves. The losers.
Oops, there I go again.
Anyway, maybe I'm finally beginning to get it right. After Amsterdam I moved several more times, sometimes to other countries, sometimes to other cultures, like the office culture, teaching culture, the publishing world, the art world, the music world, exploring the artist in me, the musician, the writer,  the businessman, always the outsider, at least at first until I earned some recognition for my efforts.
I still fight to understand what makes a place different, the people an almost different species, and alien habits and customs worth giving a try. I've now carried the fight to Bali, where I understand little, where the people are gentle and quick to laugh, where no one seems to want to sucker punch me, and most of all where they make me feel welcome as if they don't see a stranger in front of them, but just another person, another soul seeking acceptance. The hardening I've undergone for so long is almost reluctantly beginning to curl back, like the petals of a flower turning to the sun. Hawaii never did that to me, in spite of all the elements being present it's a tough world to break into. Maybe Bali can force me to surrender.
As the saying goes, it's not the man in the fight that counts, but the fight in the man. Right now I'm out for the count. What bliss!