I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

I was constantly trying to find myself in the world around me

I began to sense that I would be a stranger in society for the rest of my life, and the desire was born in me to lead my life outside this society.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

Till this moment I never knew myself.

I've felt as if I didn't exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can't imagine how much alone I've been all my life.

..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.

Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.

I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life.