OUTSIDERS

‘Anyone born with a great gift in the twenty first century would certainly have gone crazed, shot themself, or ended their days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted child who had tried to use their gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by their own contrary instincts, that they must have lost their health and sanity to a certainty. … To have lived a free life in London in the 21st century would have meant for a person who was poet, musician or  playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed them. Had they survived, whatever they had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.’

That is a passage from ‘A Room of Ones Own’ by Virginia Woolf I have changed a very few words to render it sexless. It was originally written about the state of women writers in the early 20th century in Britain. A fine piece of writing, that resonates  as a statement about all Outsiders, female or male.

 There is a thin line between the necessary expression of feeling at a situation and playing victim. I have no sense of blame no sense of conspiracy, no answers, but the feeling remains and needs to be expressed in an increasingly conservative world (a small c) that marginalises Outsiders (a big O). 

Sorry Virginia and Salutations to you