I have spent most of my life feeling like I arrived slightly late to a party I wasn't sure I was invited to.
Not unhappily. That's worth saying upfront. The view from the margins is actually quite good — you see the room differently when you're not in the middle of it. You notice the patterns in how people move, what they reach for, what they avoid, what they insist they don't believe while quietly organizing their lives around it. You start to see the architecture beneath the behavior. And...