Notes

Exploring Sanity.

Given the insurgence of a lot of discussion surrounding discrimination, integration and societal hierarchy systems, I sought for a while to discover, or perhaps devise, a suitable metaphor or an appropriate representation of the feeling of being left out. The object of my search was not a tangible phenomena, interchangeable with social discrimination, but a cognitive process, a memory latch, a tool if you will, to hold self-discussions of this social event. To clarify, by social discrimination, I mean the feeling of being "out of place" that an individual experiences when put in a seemingly unwelcoming social group. It is like the feeling of being different as one would experience in a foreign country. But I use this analogy with caution. Even if it invokes, some of the feelings that social discrimination invokes, it is not a good enough representation of the social process that discrimination contains. Perhaps it's the fact people travelling to foreign countries are mentally prepared for "being different", or perhaps it's the fact the feeling happens when one is away from "home". Nevertheless, the inadequacies of the "foreigner experience" are significant and not the object of this discussion, but it should suffice to say that there would be no reason for my search if this analogy was "good".

So what is the good analogy? What other social process mirrors this discrimination effectively enough such that I can use it as a language of discrimination or a reference through which, by way of comparison, new knowledge can emerge. The parallel I found is the process of acquainting oneself with a new field. Even though I typically refrain from using specific examples, I propose this one for a much greater good. Consider, a student from a less privileged background, who attains admission to go to college at an elite institution. A common situation that arises in cases such as this is the "non-integration" of the student. By way of elaboration, the student feels like (s)he doesn't belong, that people of he(r) "kind" are not represented well in the new community, and as such the system is not favorable towards he(r). The last part is essentially what I hope to capture. And I have decided to capture this in a different scenario where a student in the same college, one that may feel like a part of the institution, decides to switch his major. Inspired by a recent event in my own life, I propose that these events are mutually explorable and exploring them in tandem will offer great benefits, especially to one's understanding of the mechanics of social discrimination or feeling unwanted.

I am currently in the middle of a transition between majors. I use that phrase "in transition" because I am still uncertain as to whether I can "officially" declare myself a student of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. For a bit of background, I started my college career as Bioengineering major and I am still as fascinated by biology as I was as a freshman, and I am technically a dual, but I have found another field, in EECS, to devote my time and passions. At the moment however, I am more interested in what makes me unable to identify myself unambiguously as an EECS major. Surely, this must be a similar feeling to the case of a student who doesn't feel like (s)he can term himself a Berkeley student. For those who have hierarchies of social frustrations, I do not mean to trivialize the feeling of "alone-ness". If my language irredeemably does that, I apologize for the limitations of English and perhaps my inability to adequately discriminate. I certainly feel "untrue" calling myself an EECS major. This is nobody's fault. It is more easily a personal quirkiness than it is the result of some social imbalance.

Examining what I feel comfortable (read confident) calling myself and what I don't feel confident calling myself, I have come up with a common denominator that distinguishes what I think I should identify with from what I don't. It would seem that personally, my sense of "belongingness" is tied to how much knowledge I have of the particular society and how much, in relation to my other "belongings", I can talk about this society. Otherwise, I find that this feeling of seeming like a fraud creeps up. This is what I am likening to social alienation. Different individuals perhaps have different denominators to gauge whether they belong in a social group and when it happens that they feel like they don't, it seems easy to blame the social group for being unwelcoming. Natural tendencies often lead us to expose or invent a causal agent. However, the feelings that constitute alienation seems to be at least due to psychological processes as much as it is due to certain characteristics of the particular society.

*Disclaimer: The use of masculine gendered possessive pronouns serves to assuage the writer's need for structure. They can be read in whatever pronoun the reader deems appropriate and do not reinforce or endorse patriarchy of any form.

I just had a thought to explore whether feeling left out is no different from feeling surplus.