This is part two of an eight-part series. Read the other parts here…

My sister and I spend a lot of time together. We enjoy having really great discussions, sharing observations, jokes, and just generally being best friends. And a while back, I made some comment along the lines that I dress pretty normally, and my sister just looked at me and said “Idzie, you’ve forgotten what normal is.”

I regularly forget what normal is about more than just clothing. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not, but I think it does say something about where, and with whom, I spend most of my time!

I’ve been asked if I feel unschooling made, and makes, it harder for me to connect with “regular” people, and I find that a difficult question to begin with, just because there are so many ways in which my views and lifestyle are, well, far from mainstream. It goes beyond just what could be covered under the label of unschooler.

Some people seem able to find common ground with every single person they come across, and I truly envy that skill. Because so often, with new acquaintances, I find myself running out of anything to talk about very, very quickly. Being the unschooling, vegetarian, animistic, green-anarchist, feminist, hippie freak that I am, what’s on my radar tends to look pretty different than the things that feature most prominently in many other peoples lives.

I don’t say this in any attempt to be special, or pretend that I’m unique in these experiences. I’ve learned enough at this point in my life to know that everyone, no matter how mainstream (or not) they are, feels different and misunderstood at times. But it seems to me that most people, those that are following a path deemed appropriate by the dominant culture, have, at the very least, a common base to draw upon. Whether they’re comfortable in conversation with people they know little or not, at least they can talk about what courses they’re taking in college, crappy bosses at work, friction with parents…

With me, and the people I tend to spend most of my time with, that’s not usually the case. Instead, I’m left floundering, trying to find some common experience or interest, some point of connection.

I don’t think it’s just unschooling, but I do think my views, and the way I live and plan to live, make it hard to connect with people at times.

So I suppose I’m grateful I regularly forget what normal is, because it means I’ve found people to spend time with whom I feel a real kinship: people who get me, and understand why I think and do what I do.

When I was a child, my family was involved in what home education community there was near us. It wasn’t nearly as large as it is now, and unlike the younger, larger, current home learning community to be found in Montreal, which is very secular and quite relaxed, the community to be found when I was young was largely conservatively religious and very school-at-home. While I found some common areas of interest—many families were quite crafty, for instance, and very into spending time in nature—for the most part, the worldview of my family was very different from the views of the other families involved in co-ops and science clubs and other home learning activities.

Fast-forward a few years, as I was entering my teens, and feeling more shy and introverted than ever. The few friends I had through home learning activities were going into high school, and I felt more lonely than ever.

I managed okay for my first few years of teenage-hood. I just didn’t interact very much with other people. I joined the Air Cadets just to have more social interaction in my life, and the knowledge that I was un-cool, knowledge I’d already been pretty sure of before-hand, was quickly confirmed by the fact that, despite being surrounded several days a week by a large group of people, I continued to not make any real friends and to feel out of place.

Air Cadets taught me quite a bit, and helped to shape many fledgling ideas and views that had been lurking in the recesses of my brain for a while.

You won’t find anything about the learning I attribute to Cadets in any of their publicity material.

I feel like it’s almost a taboo thing with all school-free learners, including unschoolers, to talk about being lonely or not fitting in. Such a common criticism from outsiders is school-free learners won’t be “socialized,” and will instead be forever “socially awkward” and “unable to interact with others.” So we get used to touting the party line that unschoolers have tons of friends, do tons of activities, never have any trouble interacting with anyone, ever, etc.

When, that’s not really the case.

Some unschoolers do have tons of friends. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Some unschoolers are quite happy with only a few friends. There’s nothing wrong with that, either. Different people are happy with different amounts of social stimulation, and more or less downtime. One of the many benefits of unschooling is a persons ability to choose how much time they want to spend at home or out-and-about; with family, or friends, or by themselves. And an individual’s ease with others, how well they naturally deal with people, is not at all dependent on whether they go to school or not. Neither is having more difficulty with people a horrible mark against you (or, should I say, it shouldn’t be). Social skills are just yet another skill that takes more work for some than others, like cooking or algebra or mechanics. I’m very fed up with hearing people talk about “social awkwardness” as if it’s the eighth deadly sin. Unschooling gives people the space to be who they are, and gain the skills needed to function in the world at their own pace and in the ways that make them the most comfortable.

And sometimes, unschoolers just have trouble making friends and fitting in.

I did. And I really tried to be normal! I did all the things I thought you were supposed to do, and still I felt out-of-place and unhappy. How do all the people around me manage this, I thought? What am I doing wrong?

Of course, I came to a point of embracing who I am, following what I actually think and believe, not what those around me do, or what anyone tells me I should think and believe. I realized that the majority of people—though good at fitting in, and molding themselves into the image society tells them to fit—are not happy people.

Conformity in some ways might be the easier option—for those in school I think it’s often a way to survive—but it’s not a fulfilling one.

A big part of what lead me to these realizations was actually meeting other people who were also going against the current. I met unschoolers, and my life changed.

That’s how important finding community is.

This is part two of our eight-part series, Week of the Idzie. Read the full series here.

This essay originally was part of a keynote speech Idzie gave at the 2011 Toronto Unschooling Conference.