When I was in my 20's at college, I would sometimes find the bad part of town and just ride around on my motorcycle. I'd do this when I was lonely and needing that "belonging" feeling.
So, from that early age on the other side of town, I've embraced otherness, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I went back in the 80's to see my uncle, after my grandparents died. The house was falling down around him, but the rest of the neighborhood was in a similar state (still poor, still all black). When I knocked, a girl on a stoop across the street told me "the white man that rides the bicycle" wouldn't be back for a while. So I hung around. Because I was there during the week, instead of the weekend, it felt different. But, I was a lot older, too. I still felt at home, though.
A few years later the church across the screen bought my uncle's house and made it a parking lot. It was a good deal for them, since the house had been condemned by then. I haven't been back to my home city, but I did look at the street on google street view. Made me sad.
That sounds similar to what's happening to my dad's place. The city reconnected a main street to circumnavigate his entire mobile home community a few years back.
I remember a quote from a Mexican-American movie (Selena) "We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It's exhausting!"
I too think I get better insights sometimes and it let me learn how wrong this kind of border thinking actually is.
I feel like I am an alien on parent earth with no place to call home.
> But I'm permanently alone in a crowd, too. Always on the outside looking in. Suspicious of the herd. Skeptical of consensus. Circumspect. Cantankerous at times. I am, simply, permanently, "the other".
This is exactly where I ended up, there's no going back now, no 'home' where I feel I belong. Biggest contributing factors were hitchhiking across the planet and experiencing Ayahuasca. But I also feel that just understanding the importance of free software as a political right puts a huge rift between me and the people I meet.
A society is built on shared assumptions, a mutual understanding if you will. When you reject an assumption required for participation then you stand alone and the understanding is no longer mutual.
My longest time abroad was a year in Chicago, and the place where I grew up is far too boring to ever be considered 'home', so I really have no idea where 'home' would be for me. But I'm largely just indifferent to the idea.
FWIW: I have many American friends living here in Berlin, and none of them are really struggling with their identity. But it may be different if you never had the experience of being part of the 'native' population... It's probably a similar fate to what members of other minorities (religion/race/disability) experience.
As an American-born Saudi, living most of my life to and fro between the two countries I'm from, I had quite the same experience.
I can from experience say it's one that some children of immigrant parents (or parents that moved a lot, and/or both) identify as, when they don't identify with their own culture nor have complete familiarity with their surrounding one (nor have a 'derivative clique' of similar parents-of-immigrants to identify with - though even if they did, they'd likely have a common 'outsider' mindset w.r.t. 'everyone else').
It's funny, iirc the whole "thankful for the outsider's perspective" thing was essay/application fodder for me at one point, and something which I considered might be useful for a particular career path.
All this to say - thinking of yourself as "alone in a crowd" is likely a risky supposition if what you're after is the true state of things. https://xkcd.com/610/
But I'm permanently alone in a crowd, too. Always on the outside looking in. Suspicious of the herd. Skeptical of consensus. Circumspect. Cantankerous at times. I am, simply, permanently, "the other".
It's all not bad. You notice things other people don't wherever you go. You're the first person to seek out the people who don't fit in and hold out your hand in friendship. Because you know, deep down, that with all the divisiveness we're experiencing right now, that we will never get through it any stronger without the greatest concern for each other.