What lies beyond

Hermitage

Flavia, as a child needs her space to be alone and think (or rather 'metabolize' always new information), to be able to decide when to stay in company and when to isolate herself.
For that she's always seen in a strange way by those around her, and her desire for isolation is transmitted and misinterpreted, leading others to put her aside, ignoring her or treating her with suspicion because she's different from other children, deeper.
Thus, what began as a need will soon be transformed into a constraint.
Staying alone becomes her everyday life, starting by her own family and then continuing in school, in sports environments, extracurricular activities (which she plays with desire and dedication because she loves doing and always learn new things) where she remains secluded in the shade, never giving her opinion to not risk saying the wrong thing and being ghettoized, without realizing that this very behavior brings her to self-segregation and it doesn't allow people with whom she relates to, to understand what she really thinks and wants.
This probably stems from her desire to be accepted, achieving the opposite effect, because the human mind considers weak and malleable someone who does not express its will, and maybe it is so, and that's why although Flavia tries one time and another, she's not good in interpersonal relationships.
Or maybe it's because she has never complied with what the society has always required. She doesn't care whether something is considered to be for male or female, if she likes it she does it, or she buys it, or she sees it. Perhaps for this reason, she feels like a rare bird, something strange and different. Because she isn't the only one to do this kind of things, but she feels like she's the only one to sense its weight. To feel this unsettling loneliness that convinces her that she is 'different', 'strange'.
And when you're little it's not easy to hold the weight of diversity, especially if you are not supported by those who more than anyone else should do it, family.
Flavia feels she has nothing in common with those around her, as if she came from another planet, and maybe it is so because she doesn't feel at home anywhere, she doesn't feel complete and yearns to reach her dimension, that in childhood was so easy to create, her imagination was enough; but that going forward with the years has become increasingly difficult to find, it be for the patterns that force her, for real life that frames her with its rules about what is right or wrong, good or bad or simply she is beginning to succumb to those who are known as social rules, though she does not know how to interpret and often misrepresent them, finding herself in unpleasant situations without wanting and having to justify to the behaviors she judge right, but that for the rest of the world are not.
It is not easy to balance, especially when she is a young woman in search of approval; the more she tries to get it, the more life puts in front of her tests that discourage and make her believe that it is better to surrender to the inevitability of things and be carried away by the stream that is created to enclose individuals in society.
Flavia is alone even when she's surrounded by people, because she feels to 'not' belong. And that is what let her to always move further, seeking independence and the dimension where at last she may be only what she is, when in front of everyone she pretends.
Moving forward with time, she becomes increasingly good at it, so much so that she stops feeling so inadequate and begins to understand certain mechanisms that regulate social life; although in the end she always falls into a generalized lack of something that brings her with inevitable certainty to change course so she can continue to look for what she has lost, or maybe never really had, but that she yearns with all her being.