This is the first step on how I actually learn the dimension of perception-making through separating and learning about people outside me to understand my self or what is self.
I thought the world is just world. You cannot bargain on it. The world is just like that. Nothing to be questioned just live in it. However, I was always been feeling lonely, unaccepted, excluded, misunderstood, over-explained, weird, angry, sad, and hardly agree with what society I live in and hate being called as renegade, rebels, naughty, non-conformist, weirdo, asian, indonesian, javanese, salatiga, etc.
Meanwhile, I feel like I am just a normal kid/person that did not asked to be alive yet need to be alive until my peers and school bullying happened to me, put me in a box of certain categorization of people and created the wounds of belong and longing. Identity crises. I swallow everything from one projection to the other projections of people at certain level of stage understanding their life and world and be the victim-hero and to actually be the villian of life through their perception of me.
Including me. Its not just other people. The hatred, anger, and demons lived within me. I project my thoughts, fear, anxiety and perception of self to the others and othering whose my people and not — directly-indirectly excluding and including people into a box based on who I was told I am by the bullies–peers, caregivers or parents, superior, others.
I feel like I spent most of my 20s learning about other people just to understand about myself. Meanwhile, I myself was just a wounded, hurted, misunderstood kid. So ya, I am lost in the vortex of others perception avout life. I am suffocated, full of anger, anxiety, and tired of always explaining about who I am and why I am like this by learning about other beings including my family and surroundings. I hate my self and always question myself why I am so different, did not want to be the same, yet I was just creating alternative form of life from majority of people since they try to put me in a cage and prisoning me into their own control of perception-making. Meanings I am still entangled to the others and never can be and lived alone by myself. I still need people yet craving to be understood.
So then anthropology safe me from the unknowing and narrowed understanding of self from the perception of other people about me – the misfit.
Started in 2012, the year where I started actually feel and materialise the grieves to feel different and unacceptable. I exposed it through the rejection to conform in certain level like fashion, group of people, the way I act and react, music preference, hobby preference, learnt esoteric knowledge (tarot, numerology, myth, psychology), smoking, etc.
Students of Anthropology and early learner of ethnography method probably familiar with the words of otherness, othering and the others. But what is actually “the other”?
It is simply a person and people outside of the environment and the different. Although having similar backgrounds: gender, ethnic, religion, race, nationality, age, generations, culture, political affiliations, education, income, job, family, etc people can still be different. There is no solely called as homo nor hetero. Everything mix and intertwined with each other in certain time, space conjucture.
So then, How do we actually positioning ourselves hence we are not get trapped into othering other people and the otherness? Is it possible? Does it realistic while all the backgrounds played apart in our daily life and (re)create chaos and contradiction? Does it matter? It is matter and it is not. Yet our level of understanding and awareness matters in this people power dynamics.
