Over a lifetime I’ve discovered that I’m an outsider even among outsiders. My native bent for solitude distances me even from other outsiders who form their own subcommunities when they accidentally find each other.

The joiner gene was somehow left out of my blueprint. A ghost of it has sometimes awakened, as in my erstwhile, years-long involvement in the horror writing community, especially but not exclusively the Ligottian subset. But it always winks back out of existence after awhile.

Not a Groucho Marxist self-conscious attitude of never consenting to be a member of any club that would have me as a member, but just a foundational, native sense of solitude and distance, extending from the existential to the social, and encompassing even the vanishingly rare and sparse group with whom this personal character in the cosmic play shares an affinity.

Weirdly, it’s when I fully relax into this that I feel closer and more at ease with people. Simply recognizing how this personality and sensibility are formed and tuned in this way, and letting it be okay as it is, somehow unlocks or uncovers a sense of closeness and even affection for others. There’s still no impulse to join, and in fact a positive sense of demotivation for doing so. But it’s a soft feeling instead of an awkward or stand-offish one. It finds other persons to be perfectly fine, too, just as they are.

I’m confident there are plenty of others who share this same character cast, this same set point. A silent, scattered, distributed non-community.