Free Spirit in a Conventional World & The Issue of Belonging

Unconventionality. Truly free spirits. Living outside consensual reality. Having internal rather than external authority. And: Belonging. An ensuing key issue for everybody who has long left the beaten track. Conventions provide a sense of belonging - but what if you've left conventionality behind, and done so maybe a long time ago? How and where do you experience a sense of belonging, where do you fit in, who are your people?

If your 'spirit' (for lack of a better word) isn't tethered to an organized belief system, a societal tapestry of norms and more or less conscious tenets, if you aren't bound by cultural or ethnic identities, and if you've been at odds with conventionality ... again: how and where do you experience a sense of belonging, where do you fit in, who are your people?

Consensual reality is powerful medicine. You are 'bought into it' whether you like it or not. Then, one day you wake to the fact that the medicine doesn't jive with your senses, sensibilities, and preferences. First, you revolt, second you get strategic, and lastly, you exit. You exit consensual reality and just about everybody begins to appear to be a stranger to you. They may as well be of a different breed, a different species.

This sort of thing is my bag ;-) I have shuffled along the lonesome path of unconventionality all my life, struggling to bridge the singularity of existential freedom with the relative auto-pilot with which society at large, and all its members, shuffle along in existing lanes. Lanes of belonging, but lanes that asphyxiate me and make me break out in figurative (and sometimes literal) sweats.

Are you here? Are you truly outside of convention, and possibly have been so for a long time? Are you up for a salon-ish get together to converse, exchange, and extend tentative tentacles that, due to our human nature, do want to experience a sense of belonging. If so, reach out, and once we'll have a handful, we'll set a venue to meet. up. In looking for suitable meetup groups for myself (at the end of September 2018), I came up with the idea to create one. The subject is one of the closest to my heart, and it sure would be nice to  meet some truly unconventional people, who look at society from the outside in - rather than from the inside out! - and understand, learn, share, and - gasp - maybe develop a sense of be[long]ing? ;-)