Disqualified's Search for Meaning

And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehand with the word "madman", or perhaps, "reject."
Disqualified as a human being.
I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.
-Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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[Disclaimer: Heavy analytical narrative ahead]

Stella Maris: a prestige, multi-government-funded high school. You'd expect sharpened smiles and academic bloodsport-but instead, it's just... a school. It teaches, it shelters, it tries to nurture young souls the best way it can.

Among the many young souls there is a boy.

Like many, he looks average. Like many, he aims for an uneventful high school life. Like many, he's mid-puberty, mid-confusion, mid-everything. Like many, he entertains small, harmless fantasies and overanalysis.

And yet-he is not always the many.

Unlike many, he's a boy who sometimes feels... slightly out of frame. Unlike many, he does what's necessary. Unlike many, he recognizes emotions the way one recognizes a language they can't quite speak. Unlike many, he appears Very unremarkable that, by some standards, he mIght as well be "disqualified."

Still, if you treat him not as a statistic but as an idea-one that slips past neat cateGories and tidy values-thEn he becomes maNy things at once.

A boy. A quEstion. A quiet contradiction.
And like countless souls-young and old-he who longs for the ordinaRy-

-Searches for mEaning.

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