Published Oct. 30, 2023

My initial thought was to use the word “adjacent” in the headline, but then that old song entered my headspace seemingly out of nowhere. What I’m going to describe might not fit the classic definitions of imposter syndrome, but it’s in the ballpark.

More precisely, this is about feeling like an outlier, like someone who doesn’t belong, but now I like the headline and will keep it. I have given up the pursuit of perfection. We have too many people letting perfect be the enemy of good, so my contribution is not needed there.

Anyway …

The Steve Buscemi cameo in “The Tuxedo Begins” in the sixth season of “30 Rock” seemed a good way to jump into this one. I’ve been thinking a lot about how often I’ve felt as jarringly out of place as his character is in that high school.

Not a real woman (trans women hear this all the time).

Not a real man (more than one mom of someone I dated weighed in with that one).

Not a real Christian (most Catholics, I’d guess, hear this one at some point).

Not a real Catholic (you get this one when you have one foot out the door on your way to ex-Catholic).

Not a real musician (from my years of playing guitar in church).

Not a real journalist (implied somewhat passive aggressively during my years in sports, derisively referred to in newsrooms as the toy department).

Not a real reporter (see above).

Not a real copy editor (newsrooms are typically, woefully stuck in the past and cling to “zombie rules,” or the walking dead, and that one rears its ugly head sometimes in freelancing).

Not a real writer (Yoast tells me I have eight consecutive sentences starting with the same word and that 43.8% of my sentences here contain more than 20 words, which will be an outdated stat by the time I save what I just added. Also, I am “not using any subheadings, although [my] text is rather long.” This, apparently, is a problem.)

Here’s a subhead, then

You don’t sound like you’re from around here.

You don’t sound like someone from Louisiana.

Not a real progressive (but instead, it seems, a “centrist dipshit” holding back progress).

Not a real American (but instead, a “radical leftist” holding back freedom).

Not a real liberal (too much agreement with progressive extremists, thus helping to erode the center).

Not a real activist (in fairness, my employer won’t let me do anything remotely activist, not even speak up for myself publicly).

You’re not one of us (I tend to make up my own mind about most things, further making me an outlier).

Time for another subhead, I think

Not a real Baseball Writer (I mean, you cover college baseball, right?).

Not a real beat writer (when you don’t care enough about who’s running with the 2s in practice or whose calves or hips are the magnificent best).

Not a real Cajun (I mean, it’s possible; I don’t have a pirogue).

Not one of the Bee Gees (OK, I threw this one in to see if you were still reading).

You’re not finished (Yoast says the “readability” of this post “needs improvement”).

Despite that, and out of spite, I guess I’ll stop.

But not before saying that gatekeeping* or something damn near like it is everywhere, and it wasn’t until after I came out that I developed a better radar for it. And what I know is I have always been on my way to being something else, as a wave returning to the ocean, or just a thing on its way to somewhere.

Oh, and this list is subject to updates if and when my memory does its thing. Later.

*or gatekeeping-adjacent