Half Here, Half Elsewhere

When you experience the world through a different lens, it creates this invisible distance between you and others. You’re there, but something always feels a little off. You watch the flow of life around you, but something holds you a little apart from it, like you’re just a step behind or a beat off - and you’re left there trying to catch up, never fully in sync.

People move through their days with an ease that has always eluded me. Their words come effortlessly, while I find myself pausing, searching for the right ones. I change how I talk, how I act, trying my best to blend in. I admit I still mess it up sometimes, but I’ve gotten relatively good at shrinking the parts of me that don’t land right. When I don’t, I’m met with frustration and impatience, as if my dissonance could be corrected with just a little more effort.

But that’s the problem with masking: it works, until it doesn’t. The more I mould myself into someone I’m not, the more detached I become from what’s real. The longer I perform, the harder it is to tell where the act ends and I begin. I often wonder how much of myself I’ve traded away just to seem intact.

Even when I’ve done everything “right,” there’s this background noise I can’t seem to turn down. Sometimes, the air carries a heaviness I can’t explain, as if my mind is holding onto worry for no clear reason. Trying to describe it never really works because it always sounds smaller than it feels. It’s not like I’m constantly waiting for things to go wrong - and to be honest, when these feelings creep in, I’m rarely sure anything’s truly wrong either, but there’s a quiet tension I can’t ignore.

Trying to put this feeling of disconnect into words somehow makes it hurt even more - as if naming it makes it more real, and thus harder to carry. It’s like everyone seems to have a steady compass, while mine feels like it’s pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. What words can hold a feeling you barely understand yourself?

What I carry isn’t always visible, but it’s persistent. It’s not quite loneliness, at least not most of the time, but something harder to name: a sense of being untethered, adrift in a world that feels distant. I try to find something solid to hold onto: routines, small comforts, even pieces of who I am, but nothing ever feels steady enough. The desire to reach out and close that gap can be impossible to ignore at times, but even thinking about trying weighs me down.

I still deeply long for connection, even if it feels fragile and uncertain. However when I try to get close to it, I hesitate: doubting whether I’m enough as I am, or if revealing too much will only push people away. It’s a struggle between wanting to be seen and being scared of what that might mean. So I keep my distance, because hiding hurts less than feeling out of place.

I’ve drifted so far from where I started, I’m not too sure what I was reaching for to begin with. I keep telling myself there’s a corner where’s there’s room for me, a place where I won’t feel like an intruder, but most of the time, it feels like I’m looking for a door that was never meant to open for me anyways.

I often find myself thinking about who I could’ve been if I hadn’t poured so much energy into trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense to anyone else. It’s hard not to feel the weight of all that effort just to keep myself from falling apart. While others grow and move forward, I’ve been preoccupied with the turbulence inside my own mind. There’s a grief in that. Not just for the connections I can’t quite reach, but for the version of me that never had the chance to surface.

I used to think things would eventually fall into place, that if I waited long enough, I’d catch up, or grow into myself somehow. But time keeps moving, and I’m starting to realise that waiting has a cost. Somewhere along the way, I lost track of where I was heading, and now it just feels like the years have melted into each other. I don’t remember when things started slipping, only that I kept trying to keep up. Now all I see are the parts that never fit, and the time I spent struggling to make them.

Even with all the ache, something in me keeps holding. It could be resilience, or it could just be the fact that I’m still here, even when I thought I wouldn’t be. Some days, simply being here and showing up for myself is all I can manage. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to anyone else. But to me, it means I haven’t given up yet.

Every now and then, in the spaces between everything else, I catch glimpses of something less distant. Like the full moon spilling its light across the night, almost like it’s offering a quiet invitation. Or the wind rustling through the branches, like it’s carrying a message just for me. It’s in these moments that I find purpose. Small, quiet fragments that others might pass by without a second thought, but for me, they feel like a connection to something deeper, something real. And maybe, in a world that often seems foreign, that’s enough.

Living with schizotypal personality disorder means walking through the world with a mind that doesn’t always meet reality on common ground. Ordinary things take on extra layers. Sometimes there’s a rich kind of depth in that. Other times it’s just exhausting. I want to believe it means something. But I don’t always know what.

I want to say I’m learning to live in my own way, but honestly, it’s more like feeling my way around in the dark. Some moments feel softer and quieter, but most just feel uncertain and tangled. I don’t know if I’m getting anywhere or if this is just what life looks like now. And maybe that’s okay. Well, maybe not. I’m still waiting to see.

Maybe healing isn’t about arriving at some polished version of myself, but about giving those parts of me I’ve hidden away some space, even if that space feels messy or cramped. Although I don’t really know if that’s healing, or just a way to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Some days it feels like I’m just holding on by a thread, wondering if it’s really enough or if I’m just fooling myself.

Distance and disconnection have become a chapter in my story - one I’m not sure I can rewrite.

But I’ve made a kind of life out here, at the edge of things.

I just wish it didn’t feel so far.