A couple of realizations hit me the other day: 1) I have a paranoid streak that is more than an occasional thing, and 2) I am especially paranoid about relationships and social situations.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the root of my paranoia is a feeling that I don’t quite belong in a group. It’s almost like I don’t quite speak the language well enough to catch the idioms and subtleties of everyday conversation. Cues to context, subtext, and pretext that let a normal person understand what a person means when they speak do not come naturally to me.
It probably doesn’t help that I was frequently made fun of as a kid because I didn’t act quite right. I’ve just always seen the world a little differently than everyone else, and important bits have mystified me at the worst possible moments. As a result, when I feel I’m missing something or that I don’t belong, I start to think people are talking shit about me, but in a figurative language I don’t understand.
My paranoia has been so bad at times that I’ve been tempted to bug my office so I can hear what my coworkers are saying when I’m not around. I didn’t do that – partly because it’s crazy pants and partly because I think I’m better off not knowing what people really think of me. When my wife and I were first dating, I showed up at her work and she was in a closed door meeting. I was convinced she was having sex with a coworker behind that closed door (instead of the far more likely explanation that she was just having a meeting). On another occasion, I did buy a bug and was going to place it in a friend’s office because I was convinced he was betraying me. Actually, it turned out he was, but that’s another story.
Anyway, the point is I struggle with paranoia because of my sense that I don’t belong. This brings me to the title of this post: The Belonging Kind is a short story by William Gibson and John Shirley. I first read it about 10 years ago in Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome – which is quite good, by the way. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I myself was surprised just a few days ago when I learned that the story is a “quiet horror” story rather than an insightful sci-fi story about finding a sense of belonging. The irony was not lost on me. At least, I don’t think it was.
Untangling the Gord 