Being a "misfit" is an interesting piece of terminology.
I'm willing to bet that most of us — at one time or another — I felt like we were a misfit in some way. So what does it even mean to be a misfit?
The closest I've been able to get to a reasonable explanation is that whatever it is you are or whatever it is you believe or whatever it is you feel or think, it requires further explanation in order for people to relate to it. There are questions.
When I make the — 100% true — statement that my grandfather was born in 1871, that usually causes raised eyebrows and a lot of people to want to ask questions. Given that I was born in 1960, nobody would likely ask a question if I instead said that my grandfather was born in 1915. It tracks.
But 1871? That's 154 years ago...
That raises questions. I have to take the time to explain myself. Being a misfit — in whatever way you might be a misfit — invariably means that things don't flow, they always involve questions, and explanations, and perhaps people feeling a little bit mystified and alienated by the information you give them.
My father was 42, and my mother was 39, when I was born.
In 1960, being born to parents of that age was virtually unheard of. And I might add that being born to ”older” parents involved its own set of challenges, along with more questions. Technically speaking, my father could have been my grandfather, age wise.
These days, being born to parents when they're about 40 doesn't raise as many eyebrows as it once did.
Now, to make things a little more complicated, my father was also born 14 years after his nearest sibling. His father — my grandfather — became a father to my father at age 47.
If you do the math on that, it's easy to see how I could, indeed, have a grandfather that was 89 years older than me. Hence the term "generational misfit," along with lots and lots of questions!
On the surface, you might be thinking that it's no big deal. Technically speaking, I suppose it isn't. But from a psychological perspective it leaves you with some rather strange interpretations of who your peers truly are.
Being raised by parents who are in their 40s and 50s is a very different experience from being raised by parents who are in their 20s and 30s. I mean that from a values perspective, as well as from an interest and socialization perspective.
However, the generational misfit thing extends further back than that. When I arrived on the scene as the bouncing baby boy of a couple of approximately 40-year olds... let's keep in mind that those 40-year olds had also been raised by older people. And so, I actually ended up having been raised by two generations of "older" people.
Kids are very perceptive!
I didn't really think so much of it at the time but in a sense my peers in grade school had a clear understanding of who I was because one of the nicknames that followed me from about third grade until I graduated high school was ”grandpa.”
Consequently, I learned to mostly keep to myself as a young person, because I got incredibly tired of answering all the questions. I didn't really feel so much as a true "peer" of other kids my age — I was always saying the wrong thngs and drawing the wrong conclusions — as I felt like some kind of strange lab experiment that they enjoyed looking at to see what I would do next.
Being a soft spoken and compliant kid I figured the best course of action was just to disappear into the woodwork and become invisible as opposed to stand up and punch somebody in the snout whenever they became particularly "invasive."
After all, they weren't exactly wrong to want answers.
As I have aged, it increasingly feels like I have "grown into my age."
I don't feel like I have changed a lot — other than my occasionally achy bones — but the people around me seem to have changed to become a lot more like I feel I always was.
Strange, how that works out...
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Created at 2025.05.11 13:58 PST
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