Faqryza: Existential Isolation
When I was an undergraduate student, being introduced to the notion of existential isolation through social psychology was eye-opening. While I had always felt alienated from certain reference groups due to my existence as a minority in a foreign country, I had never thought that there was a name for the essence of my entire experience regarding the phenomenon. Even in my home country, I had always felt that my experiences were starkly different than those of other people, since I come from a family that essentially falls outside of the normative cultural script. It wasn’t just these social constructs that made me feel like nobody shared my experiences; it was also the small things—my macabre sense of humor, my niche hobbies and interests, my neurotic tendencies—that fostered the awareness that I experience and interpret reality in a completely different way than other people do. The sense of vindication that stemmed from knowing that existential isolation was a theory that actually existed was welcomed, but more important than that was the sense of comfort that I derived from knowing that I was not isolated in my isolation. Even if other people will never share and understand my experiences—nor I theirs—I still find it infinitely interesting how we strive to build connections between one another despite knowing that our subjective experiences are uniquely different.