Maybe You’re Not Broken, Maybe You’re Just Wired Differently
What my lifelong aversion to sports, crowds, and group rituals might help you understand about yourself
- Self-Reflection, 2022 by author
If you have ever sat in a room full of people and felt like an alien, this is for you.
If you have ever wondered why other people seem to love things that leave you cold, sports, crowds, parties, and group rituals, this may help.
I could be the only human being who walked out of a Super Bowl game thinking to myself, How boring and stupid is this? True story. It was Super Bowl XXX, hosted in Tempe, Arizona, in 1996.
Everyone who knew about my Super Bowl stunt thought I was stupid. As if, Dude, what’s wrong with you?
For most of my life, I asked myself the same question
Was something wrong with me, considering I always had an aversion to spectator sports, group activities, and cruise ships? Not broken in some dramatic, obvious way. Just off. Different in a way that made ordinary social life feel unnatural, and at times, downright absurd.
I used to feel so out of place that my exit strategy was to hammer as much beer as I could and get drunk enough not to care about walking out.
Was it possible God made me with the intent to completely suck at belonging, spectating, and doing “normal human stuff”?
Or maybe it was something else
Here is what made it more confusing. I have been an athlete most of my life. I love sport when I am learning it, doing it, chasing mastery through it.
As a kid, I watched professional tennis players, Nordic skiers, alpine skiers, swimmers, and cyclists because I wanted to study them. That’s all. Playing sports was the identity that kept the agony of adolescence tolerable, but barely.
By the time I left for college, I was the small-town “star” in tennis. Later in life, I did the same with archery and pickleball. I watched to learn. I watched to improve. I watched because I wanted to win the gold, stand on the podium, and for one shining instant feel like a superhero.
I had a desperate need to be seen, heard, and win, rivaled only by my need for other people’s approval.
But I routinely felt like I sucked at belonging, until I didn’t.
Age helped. So did suffering. So did paying attention.
Life gets better when we let go of the ego
As I’ve gotten older, the need to compete and win is practically gone. For decades, I hustled, hawked, and marketed my way through building a couple of successful small businesses. But these days, I’m sick of promoting myself and have no need to be on a podium. It’s as if my ego did its thing and now sits way back in my psyche.
And I’m pretty much done arguing with reality. I let go of any delusion that I can control the uncontrollable.
I’m living proof that people change
But we have to work on ourselves to understand and manage the inner game of being a social animal. Suffering can change us if we let it. It only requires being sick of it, owning your part, and shifting your mindset to replace lame habits.
But back to the sports thing. What I finally came to understand is that many people do not love sports because of the sports themselves. They love what the sport gives them.
Belonging. Identity. Ritual. Tribe. A ready-made way to say, These are my people.
That helped me understand something about myself.
My problem was never that I hated sports. My problem was that I spent too many years assuming that because I did not respond to the tribe the way others did, something was wrong with me.
It wasn’t. I hadn’t found my way yet, because I didn’t know enough about who I am.
I was simply not wired for borrowed identity. I liked participation, not spectatorship. I liked mastery, not noise. I liked learning, not ritual. I liked direct experience, not emotional secondhand smoke from a stadium full of strangers or a living room full of men yelling at a screen.
That difference matters.
Some people come alive in crowds, some do not. I do not. I prefer solitude, reflection, and one-on-one connection. That is the real me.
Maybe you do too. If so, neither is right nor wrong. It simply means human beings are wired differently.
What Jung said about finding yourself
In Carl Jung’s thought, finding your true self is not about inventing a new identity. It is about becoming conscious of what is already within you but has been buried, denied, or left undeveloped. The way to find out who you are is often to learn who you are not.
Your aversions will tell you a lot about who you are, if you pay attention.
Looking back, I can see three things were going on in me at once. First, I had a deep need to achieve. Second, I had a deep need for approval. Third, I was never comfortable with mass behavior.
Whatever the cause, the result was the same. I spent much of my life feeling like an outsider looking in.
That feeling can mess with your head
When you do not fit smoothly into what everybody else calls normal, you start to question your own nature. You wonder if you are defective, antisocial, too serious, too intense, too independent, too weird.
That is the real pain of not belonging. It is not only loneliness. It is self-doubt.
But age has a way of burning off illusions.
What I see now is that I was never damaged goods. I was never less-than. I was never missing some key ingredient of manhood or humanity because I would rather talk to the women, hang out with the kids, or disappear into my own thoughts than watch a football game with a bunch of grown men.
I was just different.
Being okay being different
Being different is not a diagnosis. It is data. It is useful information about who you are, what feeds you, what drains you, and which social rituals make you feel like you are betraying yourself.
Real peace comes when you stop arguing with your own nature. So if you have felt this same alien feeling your whole life, maybe the answer is nothing.
Maybe you are not broken. And if you are, let the teacher within guide you. To do that, you need to surrender to win.
Maybe you were just built for a different path. Your path. Your way.
Maybe your life was never meant to be lived from the outside in. Maybe it was always meant to be lived from the inside out. And if my experience helps you stop apologizing for your nature, then it has served a purpose.
Go with the flow today.
I’m an author, strategic consultant, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.