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I’m going to be putting more priority on Life on the Margins (LOM) going forward here on RJsCorner. For this post, I want to explain what this category of posts is intended to be about, and then to tell you the reasons why I will be posting more frequently about it.

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I originally wrote the title “Life Outside the Mainstream”, but after quite a bit of thought, I decided “Life On The Margins” is more appropriate. Like it or not, we are all social animals and are part of a global social network. That is one of the primary things that make us human. The definition for such a simple word as shown to the right shows how it is interwoven with life in general.

I must accept the fact that the world is mostly social in nature, and I am mostly not. But I recognize that I need to be part of it to one degree or another. So, living on the margins of that and other such worlds allows me to dip in and slip out when I need to.

It is not, nor has it ever been, my desire to be totally separated from things social. But to keep my anxiety level down to a tolerable level, I have learned how to live on the edges of that world. I have learned how to live Life on the Margins (LOM)

Not all of my life challenges are social. Some things, at least for me, are neurological, and then there is my deafness for the last 35 years. I have had to learn how to also manage these things. In the early years, that was accomplished by “masking”. That is finding ways to appear “normal”. Masking, I eventually learned, was more damaging than I ever imagined. Of course, this will be covered more in-depth in later posts.

In my 78 years of living on the margins, I have learned, often the hard way, what it takes to finally be able to celebrate my life. I hope that by telling you my stories, some of you might be able to learn from them and not have to make the same mistakes I did. That is primarily what this enhanced priority intends to do.

I want to finish this post with a basic fact that I discovered much too late in life:

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The only ones who really understand what it is like to live on the margins, are those on the margins.

There are many people who think they know what living on the margin means, particularly those in the medical establishment. Their solution too often requires them to fix us. That seems obvious when they label our conditions as disorders, diseases, and so many other ignorant names.