Do You Feel Out of Place?
You are where you are meant to be
Have you ever felt out of place? I have.
As a teenager in the ’60s I wore dresses below my knees while other girls ran up windy stairwells and crossed their legs in classrooms wearing barely enough skirt fabric to cover their lacy panties. I was being religiously modest and knew that Mary Quant, the designer of the mini skirt, was going straight to hell when she died. But this thought didn’t ease my daily dose of feeling out of place.
As an adult I admire Quant’s business sense, and appreciate the inner strength I gained by following my own path despite the public humiliation.
I wasn’t out of place at all. I was where I was meant to be. I was learning how the world worked and — more importantly — how I worked.
In Agatha Christie’s novel Towards Zero, the character Angus MacWhirter first appears in a hospital bed after an attempted suicidal leap over a cliff. He argues with the nurse that it’s his life so he has a right to take it, but she disagrees, and haltingly tries to explain what she believes:
‘It may be just by being somewhere — not doing anything — just by being at a certain place at a certain time — oh, I can’t say what I mean, but you might just — just walk along a street some day and just by doing that…
