To Be an Exception

All my life I’ve been a kind of Exception. I’ve been exempted from all sorts of rules and have been treated differently in all sorts of scenarios growing up, for better or worse.

In school I used to get time and a half on tests because of my ADHD and other related disorders. (If the teachers let me, that is.) I even got exempted from military service in the country I used to live because of this. My friends used to tell me how lucky I was for having parents that were “cool” because they didn’t care that much about me getting super high grades on exams or anything like that.

I’m not saying any of this to brag, I’m just recounting my experiences.

It wasn’t just things related to mental illness or other afflictions that made me an exception. I also just lived my life very differently from all of those I knew growing up. Things that would work for them didn’t work for me.

I never did care much for school, and one might say “ohh everyone hates school.” That’s not what I mean. I mean that school did absolutely nothing for me. Perhaps this was because they went to a very strict British private school. But regardless of the reason, I found the experience to be so torturous that at some point I just stopped going. I simply stopped attending classes.

Thankfully, I was living in a third world European country at the time, which meant that the state would not come to my house and force me to go to school. Once I was 16, I was free to miss as many classes as I wanted. My parents didn’t like this of course. There was plenty of friction in the family at the time, but it was just not working for me. At some point my father realized this and stopped caring himself. At one point in 9th grade. My father had a trip planned to attend a conference in Bulgaria. It just so happened the timing of the trip overlapped with my end of year tests. But since I hadn’t attended most classes that year, there was no way I was going to pass, let alone get high marks on said tests. So, my father asked me if I’d like to come with him during his trip. Of course, I said yes, and it was a great vacation. While the other kids were stuck in their classrooms under fluorescent lights, toiling away with pencil and paper trying to recall some stupid benign crap they had to memorize just so their parents won’t yell at them at the end of the day after seeing their score, I was relaxing by a pool and a nice hotel in another country. Eating all of their ice cream.

Ok, I might be bragging slightly here. Moving on…

If you had asked any of my teachers what they thought would become of me after I left school, most of them would probably struggle to find the way to say what they thought without sounding rude. I honestly believe most of them thought I would be a failure living with my parents my whole life or something like that. Maybe some of them thought that I could possibly eke out some kind of meager existence doing manual labor or retail work. I guarantee you, not a single one of them would guess that not only would I become a writer, but I would also become quite a successful one. Successful enough to make a very good living off of it. This isn’t something that happened by chance, by the way. I always felt like English Literature class was one of the more interesting classes I had to attend. However, at the time I just thought it was because I didn’t have to write numbers and instead just read a book for the whole period. Or that it was because the teacher was not as strict or bitchy as most of them were. Basically, I thought I liked it because I didn’t have to do work.

Little did I know it was because I actually liked writing and would end up being very passionate about it. But school is not designed to fuel your passions or find help you find what you’re calling is. It’s designed to crush your spirit. And so, during my time there, I could not fully comprehend these glimmers, these embers of passion that I had for this subject. Perhaps some of you will find this sentiment relatable. Maybe you think we’re the same. And maybe we are similar. But as I’ll go on to explain, I highly doubt that’s the case.

Again, I don’t mean to brag, but this must be said: out of all of the people I knew in high school, I ended up being an exception once again, this time in terms of success.

Almost all of my friends from high school turned out to be completely fucking miserable. They’re either unemployed or working at some insectile accounting firm making pennies because they live in Europe. No matter where you work in Europe, you’re always poor.

All of those people did well in skewl. They were the rule, not the exception like I was. And yet I’m the only one who can say with full sincerity that I am satisfied with my life at the moment.

This has also made it somewhat difficult to relate to other people or find friends. It’s not to say I’m friendless. I have many friends. But I’m very selective with the types of people that I get close to and as such it’s taken me some time to amass the number of friends that I have today.

I don’t know if this is the case for other people because again, I am not like most people, but maybe you have a friend who you feel is just like you. Perfect bros for each other or something like that. Certainly, from my outside perspective I see many types of people that are exactly the same as each other. In fact, I’d say most people are more alike than they probably realize. However, I never found someone who is exactly like me. And maybe this is because I can’t see myself from an outside perspective. Maybe there are people who are just like me and I don’t know because I can’t view myself with the same objectivity that I can view other people with. Regardless, there is some difference between the way I make friends and the way most other people seem to.

Since I’ve never found someone who is exactly like me, all of my friends end up being related to different parts of myself rather than my whole self. I have friends who I share interests or hobbies with. I have friends who have similar behaviors and tendencies as me. I have friends who share my political beliefs. But I don’t have a single friend with whom I share all three.

Again, perhaps this is normal for you. But from my experience observing other people, it does seem like most have an easier time making friends and generally getting along with people I do. That’s not to say I don’t get along with people. I do. I can get along with anyone. That’s just being polite. Rather, most people, from what I see, “become friends” with others much easier than I do. My wife, for example, has many people who she talks to and considers friends. Who, from my perspective, seem more like just casual contacts or acquaintances due to how different they are. But she enjoys speaking to them and doesn’t seem to mind the difference much. For me, if someone is not relatable enough to me, I find speaking to them to be almost banal. I can predict exactly what they’re going to say before it even comes out of their mouth, and after a few minutes of conversation, I already know exactly what they’re like, and I can probably describe to you their life story from beginning to end. Most people are just simple like that.

I find that I know more about people than they probably know about themselves. This is, at the very least, true of my friends from high school. The few of whom I’m still in contact with anyway. People tend to find this upsetting. I’ve pointed out many times to my friends over the years how the decisions they’re making will hurt them. They never listen, of course, and they get angry at me for thinking that I know better. And yet I’m always proven right, every single time after the fact. I don’t do this anymore. It’s a waste of time. But as a naive teenager, I thought that I could help people by telling them how I saw things. Which of course, as I said, ended up being right every single time, but no one believed me. I guess it doesn’t matter, it’s their life to live after all. But I don’t understand how these people could miss something that seems so obvious to me.

I recall a story of a friend whose parents were pressuring him to go to university in England. My friend did not have any interest in university. In fact, he was so clueless about what he wanted to do in life that he felt this existential dread whenever he had to seriously think about the future. He had told me once that if he wasn’t a millionaire by the time he turned 25 that he would kill himself. I’m serious! He’s 27 now and still has not killed himself. And no, he’s not a millionaire either. I knew he was lying when he told me this of course, but at the time he said it with complete seriousness in his eyes.

Anyway, I told him that he should not go to university, that he should take a year off if he had to, to try and figure himself out. Try new things. This was obvious. To me, anyway. He insisted that he had to go. You might be reading this and thinking, “Of course he had to go. His parents made him.” But this friend of mine was not your typical child of strict parents. Yes, his parents were somewhat strict. However, they would also give this kid everything he wanted, whenever he wanted it. They did not have the hardness of heart to truly force anything upon him. Just a few years before this incident I’m describing, he was on buses to other cities to see his girlfriend in the middle of the night on school nights because his parents wouldn’t let him see her otherwise. Defying his parents was something of a regular occurrence for this friend of mine. I knew that if he asserted himself and said that he did not want to go to university, his parents would eventually relent. I feel like he must have known this. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. He told me that he had to go. He told me that if he didn’t go, things would be worse. I asked him how he knew. How could a teenager possibly know? I didn’t know. But what I knew was that, at the very least, it can’t be a good idea to go when you’re so uncertain of yourself and your path. He went into game design of all things. Didn’t end up learning shit from that course. Wasted a bunch of (his parents’) money, left and did nothing with his degree. Said experience was so bad that it sent him into a multi year long depression that I’m pretty sure is still going to this day. I don’t know for sure, he doesn’t talk to me anymore. But from what I’ve heard, he went off and dated some broad from Brazil and I somehow involved with transvesite cuckold pornography.

These types of events are common occurrence in my life. I meet someone, they make a bunch of mistakes right in front of me that don’t really affect me, yet I can’t help but intervene and tell them what they’re doing wrong. They don’t believe me or are insulted by my attempts to try and dissuade them from making said mistake, and then they ruin their lives. Again, we’re not talking about tiny mistakes here. We’re talking about pivotal moments in one’s life that have been completely screwed up because they just could not think it through. All of this “empathy” that I had came from the fact that I was an exception. I thought that me being different and being able to see these things was an opportunity to help people. And I also felt like me being different should imply that other people who are different are also like me. At least in the sense that one can find success doing things “their own way”.

This is what you often hear the left say. They say things like “ohh, traditional schooling, traditional gender roles, traditional family, all of that is just a social construct and true success and fulfillment come from within.” I looked at my own life and originally thought they were right. Yeah, I don’t need all of those “traditional things” to succeed and thrive. I am doing great forging my own path forward against any and all tradition and convention. I used to think other people who claim to do the same thing were just like me. Only as I got older did I realize how absolutely and utterly wrong I was about that. If there’s one thing in my life so far that I have been the most wrong about, it was this. No one else who claims to be an exception actually is one. I used to believe it when people would say that they have the potential, talent, motivation etc., but the system they were in did not allow them to realize it. I used to believe them like a fucking retard. Because it was like that for me. Because the systems I grew up in were not made for me, I had to learn to reject them and find my own way forward before I was actually able to thrive. But then I see these other people. Many of them are on the left, but also on the right as well, who claimed that the system they were born into is the reason for their failure, yet they make little attempt to escape from it. And the ones that do just fuck themselves up even more by exiting the system. In fact, most of the time these people’s problems come from the fact that they reject the system. That’s why they haven’t done anything with themselves. I find most people who claim to be exceptions, who claim to be in the same situation that I am and that I was growing up, are in reality nothing more than lazy, pathological liars. Good for nothing societal rejects that have gained delusions of grandeur because of the left’s dominance in culture and their narrative of dismantling traditions.

I’ve tried to work with these people before. I thought that perhaps it was luck. Perhaps I just got lucky, and these other people who claim to be like me just needed some help. Just a little boost and then they could finally prove everyone wrong. I offered them that help. They never did anything with it. Any project that I tried to help them with fell through. Any money or other resources I gave them were wasted. Any amount of time I spent trying to help them was taken for granted. Every time this would happen, I would think to myself: “I wasted so much fucking time on you because I thought you were just like me. You’re not. You couldn’t be more different than me.”

However, unlike the friends I had in high school, these people did not grow to dislike me. In fact, many of them still wanted to talk to me after I both of us had given up whatever “dream” they wanted to realize. I will not provide any examples or anecdotes because of this. Despite my frustrations towards them, I don’t hate them. So I don’t want to be rude or “talk shit” about them in this piece.

All of that said, as someone who considers themselves a proper exception, as someone who has bucked trends when against tradition and has carved his own path, I’m telling you right now: No one else is like this. Do not believe anyone else when they tell you that they are “different”. They’re not. They are just like everyone else only lazier, stupider, and have been gassed up by the modern left’s narrative that anyone can be whatever they want as long as they “dream” of it. It’s retarded, and honestly the best path towards success for some of these people would just be serfdom.