Excluded Feeling Left Out Quotes

My name would be excluded from the address section in the yearbook, a professor would remember everyone's face except mine, and so on. And the countless mistakes in recordkeeping that often occured on paper. Whenever such things happened, I would cry out in my mind: Why me? Why do these things keep happening to me? Why me, of all the people in the world? I get left out. My life gets left out. When you're left out over and over again, you come to feel that you're left behind.

Those who are without children, and without even the hope of having any, feel all too keenly what it is to be excluded from this great universe of human meaning. They feel themselves as outsiders to society and even to humanity, standing in the cold, condemned for ever to experience the warmth and fulfilment of family life at best through stolen moments with other people’s children, if at all. It may be that they rarely come nearer the real thing than seeing the idealised families of the TV commercials and sitcoms: their pain will be all the greater because they cannot see that real parenthood often has its agonies and disappointments too. The fact that their view of what they are missing may be unrealistic is neither here nor there. It is their feelings that concern us for the moment, their pain at being left out, sidelined, on the margins of life.

How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I tell you what I think, since you ask, since you dare to push your repulsive face at me, from out of the smooth paintwork of my heavily mortgaged heart. I think there was only so much fun to go round, only so much and no more available. We've used it all up country dancing in the gloaming, kissing by moonlight, eating shellfish while the sun shatters on our upturned fork and we make the bon point. And of course, the think about fun is that it exists solely in retrospect, in retroscendence; when you're having fun you are perforce abandoned, unthinking. Didn't we have fun, well, didn't we? You know we did. You're with me now, aren't you? We're leaving the party together. We pause on the stairs and although we left of our own accord, pulled our coat from under the couple entwined on the bed, we already sense that it was the wrong decision, that there was a hidden hand pushing us out, wanting to exclude us. We pause on the stairs and we hear the party going on without us, a shrill of laughter, a skirl of music. Is it too late to go back? Will we feel silly if we go back up and announce to no one in particular, 'Look, the cab hasn't arrived. We thought we'd just come back up and wait for it, have a little more fun.' Well, yes, yes, we will feel silly, bloody silly, because it isn't true. The cab has arrived, we can see it at the bottom of the stairs, grunting in anticipation, straining to be clutched and directed, to take us away. Away from fun and home, home to the suburbs of maturity. One last thing. You never thought that being grown up would mean having to be quite so - how can I put it? Quite so - grown up. Now did you? You didn't think that you'd have to work at it quite so hard. It's so relentless, this being grown up, this having to be considered, poised, at home with a shifting four-dimensional matrix of Entirely Valid Considerations. You'd like to get a little tiddly, wouldn't you? You'd like to fiddle with the buttons of reality as he does, feel it up without remorse, without the sense that you have betrayed some shadowy commitment. Don't bother. I've bothered. I've gone looking for the child inside myself. Ian, the Startrite kid. I've pursued him down the disappearing paths of my own psyche. I am he as he is me, as we are all . . . His back, broad as a standing stone . . . My footsteps, ringing eerily inside my own head. I'm turning in to face myself, and face myself, and face myself. I'm looking deep into my own eyes. Ian, is that you, my significant other? I can see you now for what you are, Ian Wharton. You're standing on a high cliff, chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea. You're standing hunched up with the dull awareness of the hard graft. The heavy workload that is life, that is death, that is life again, everlasting, world without end. And now, Ian Wharton, now that you are no longer the subject of this cautionary tale, merely its object, now that you are just another unproductive atom staring out from the windows of a branded monad, now that I've got you where I want you, let the wild rumpus begin.

Neither Freud nor Kafka is saying 'tell me what you feel excluded from and I will tell you who you are', but they are saying that feeling left out is constitutive of who we take ourselves to be. Or even that so-called identity may be our self-cure for experiences of exclusion, that identities are the artefacts we make as the solution to being left out.

Neither Freud nor Kafka is saying 'tell me what you feel excluded from and I will tell you who you are', but they are saying that feeling left out is constitutive of who we take ourselves to be. Or even that so-called identity may be our self-cure for experiences of exclusion, that identities are the artefacts we make as the solution to being left out. We organize ourselves around these experiences of exclusion, and we narrow our minds to deal with them. And identity, like exclusion, makes us violent.

In response to James Baldwin's idea that it is not Black people's task to save white people given their history. "We have to give up this folly too. Much is made today of the necessity to reach out to the disaffected Trump voter. This is the latest description of the silent majority, the Reagan Democrat, or the forgotten American. For the most part were told these are the high school educated white people, working class white people who feel left out of an increasingly diverse America. These are the voters left behind a democratic party catering to so called identity politics as if talking about a living wage and healthcare as a right or affordable education or equal pay for women or equal rights for the LGBTQ community or a fair criminal justice system somehow excludes working class white people. W'ere often told they are they heartbeat of the country and we ignore them at our peril. But to direct our attention to these voters, to give our energy over to convincing them to believe otherwise often takes us away from the difficult task of building a better world. In some ways they hold the country hostage and we compromise to appease them...But all to often that compromise arrests substantive change and Black people end up having to bear the burden of that compromise while white people get to go own with their lives... Tending to the quote unquote Trump voter in that generalized sense involves trafficking in a view of the country that we ought to leave behind. We can't compromise about that... In our after times our task then is not to save Trump voters. It isn't to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe.

The proper social role of the highly able Endogenous personality is not as leader. Indeed, the Endogenous personality should be excluded from leadership as he will tend to lack the desire to cooperate with or care for the feelings of others. His role should be as an intuitive/ inspired ‘adviser’ of rulers. Adviser-of-rulers is a term which should be taken to include various types of prophet, shaman, genius, wizard, hermit, and holy fool – the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues is an historical example, as is Diogenes, the Cynic, of Sinope (c.412-323 BC), who lived in a barrel and is supposed to have snubbed Alexander the Great (without being punished), or even the Fool character in Shakespeare plays. These are extremes; but the description of Endogenous personality and of an ‘inner orientation’ also applies to most historical examples of creative genius. The Endogenous personality – therefore – does not (as most men) seek primarily for social, sexual or economic success; instead the Endogenous personality wants to live by his inner imperatives. The way it is supposed-to-work, the ‘deal’, the ‘social contract’; is that the Endogenous personality, by his non-social orientation, is working for the benefit of society as a whole; at the cost of his not competing in the usual status competitions within that society. His ‘reward’ is simply to be allowed, or – better – actively enabled, to have the minimal necessary sustenance, psychological support (principally being ‘left alone’ and not harassed or molested; but ideally sustained by his family, spouse, patron or the like) to be somehow providedwith the time and space and wherewithal to do his work and communicate the outcome. For the Endogenous personality, this is its own reward.