The old MacBook Pro heats up, so I talk with Heather, Ph.D., over the iPhone screen, my face down in the lower righthand corner.  The usual hemming and hawing about when to end this which is torture but supportive...

Relief when she lets me go, five minutes early.  Got to eat, got to get to work, got to get my mind around...

I face her with that which I've been suffering from a long time, since college really, that feeling of being taken as "weird," generally ostracized.

To whatever extent, incidental, accidental, to get a taste of that has an effect, such that you might often, if not always, be looking around, as if, "should I say this, or that; should I have said?"

The artist, or any thoughtful mind, really, entertaining thoughts that are a little extra curricular...

And when such little thoughts, ways of expression, little jokes get bludgeoned, taken humorlessly, it leaves a burn, it leaves a sting.

And who might you then turn to for support, given that feeling, "everything you do is weird, out of the ordinary, not worth the normal compensation, the normal friendship and reward.."

Then it is the people who are--as Hemingway, a natural scientist, described--broken in some way, out of having courage, the people with a good sense of the vivid reality of life enough to be broken by it, thereby all the less able to fit in but by their own mending, stronger--as Hemingway put it--in the broken places, better able to offer help and support to the rest of us, as we are all, secretly, or not secretly, broken.

(Therefore, a corollary:  Less recognition, less identity, the less of the truth of brokenness will one be able to share with those who regard themselves as unbroken.)

In the course of finding all this out, you see that it's those who claim not to be broken, functional in life and business, wreak the main damage against their fellow sentient human beings, useless, really, as far as being able to help and offer support.