I'm standing in a large room with unnumbered others. Most of the people are in the center of the floor, mingling, talking, interacting.  Living.  These people are comfortable with each other, with themselves.  Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they embrace each other in support.  Some are cruel, some are caring people.  The laughter is most often the kind where people are laughing with each other, but at times that laughter is directed at one another.

There are a few of us standing around the edges.  For the most part, we're quiet.  Moving around the edges because we're not comfortable, not with the others nor with ourselves.

If one watches the room for a while, one notices that there is sometimes movement from the center to the edge, and from the edges to the center.  At times, people from the middle move out, often when they find themselves the brunt of a joke, not part of one.  Or when they hurt and find no arms to comfort them.  Sometimes, the yearning that is a common emotion, although not a universal one, that can be observed in the outliers is enough motivation for one or a couple of them to move into the middle.  For on the outside is neither laughter nor support.

Some of us on the outside will no longer move back into that middle.  We know it's not a place we belong.  We don't know how to interact with the people there.  The one thing we've learned by trying is that we're never going to learn those skills necessary for the middle.  We know that when we give there, most of that giving will be wasted, fallen to the floor or used for purposes other than intended.  Often turned back and misshapen, hardly recognizable.

There are others on the outside who will keep going back into that middle, quickly to return, but destined to move back and forth interminably.

And there are those on the outside whose only motivation for watching is to judge, to remember, toll the count, comment and rejoice in the failures of those who move to the middle or have found their places on the fringe.  Or to laugh at the hopelessness of those moving interminably back and forth.

Once in a while a member of the fringe will find another of the outliers and find what each has to give, tried to give to others on the inside.  More rarely, three or four might be found together.

But those groups, too, are suspect.  Because the outliers mistrust groups, and to form their own is dangerous.  To give or to accept means interaction, and in each interaction is danger.

We outliers are often called wallflowers.  We're really yuccas and cacti.  Flowers, sometimes beautiful, sometimes nondescript, yet always protected by a fringe of spears, spears of our own making.  We're not picked, and we'll never be part of a bouquet.

We've found it is better to be on the outside where the jeers of those who consider us deficient can not be heard.  The middle is a safe place, in our estimation, for the perfect, especially those who are perfect in their own minds.  Our greatest fear are the outliers who quietly sit in judgment.  Because their jeers hurt the most for their unexpectedness.

They only hurt those on the outside.  Who can be hurt.