I grew up in Texas. In a little village called Wild Peach, just outside of a small town called Brazoria, I ran barefoot through the woods and climbed trees and went fishing and hunting with my dad. I played baseball and went to school, rode my bike, and watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons.

I was never much into the fishing and hunting, though I did win first place in the Freeport Freedom Fest Fishing Fiesta—which is a mouthful of alliteration that, to this day, I still admire.

I was a weird kid, as anyone who knew me will elbow aside any other contenders to attest. Quiet at times, but overly talkative at others. Socially awkward and difficult to comprehend, because all my influences were coming from books and television shows that others from that part of the world had never experienced, or even wanted to experience.

I had a good memory and a good mind for connecting ideas, so the things I talked about could be an eclectic mix of things I read, things I watched, and things the preacher said on Sunday. It all made sense to me, but it all confused the hell out of everyone else.

We lived on a plot of land that was essentially isolated from other people by acres and miles. The closest kids my age were my cousins, two girls who were far more popular in school than I was, who were also more active in things I wasn’t into, including horseback riding, sports, and 4-H Club, and the like. Maybe I could have been into those things, maybe I should have been, but I can’t remember ever having the opportunity. I don’t think anyone ever asked me.

But maybe it was me who never asked.

So instead of spending my days playing with friends and doing social-skill-building activities, I spent them quietly entertaining myself. Even when I did get involved in things like Cub Scouts or the Royal Ambassadors, or played baseball with my dad as the coach, I would inevitably drift off on my own. I’d find something interesting somewhere, and sit and study it, and pretend with it, playing spaceships or superheroes, telling myself stories.

It was incredible practice for a lifetime spent writing novels. Hours and hours of solitary time, spent with nothing but my imagination and the characters I’d created.

Eventually, that sort of life feeds and leads to writing. It’s inevitable. And for me it started very young, around five years old, when I was being taught to write not just practice prompts but ideas. I was being taught to put my thoughts down on paper, to explain or persuade. At least, I think I was. But at any rate, I did write a “book,” consisting of five pages of Big Chief notebook paper, front and back. It was a pretty simple story, but it had a plot and a moral.

It was around that time, too, that for some reason I’ll never fully understand my parents gave me a tape recorder for Christmas. That and a bag of cassettes. I remember them as being black with green and tan labels, where I could write down what was recorded. I wish to God I still had them.

Because on those tapes I dictated hours and hours of stories. Mostly stories about a young boy detective, in the fashion of Encyclopedia Brown, who was named Kevin, and who had no end of adventures. Young Kevin, Boy Detective, solved all manner of mysteries, and even met and worked with interesting characters and figures from fiction and history. He solved crimes alongside the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Marvin Zindler—the white-haired reporter from our local ABC News affiliate, who was most famous nationally for exposing “The Chicken Ranch,” which inspired the musical “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” but was more locally famous for his catchphrase, “SLIME in the ICE MACHINE!”

I really miss Marvin Zindler.

Anyway, Kevin, Boy Detective, was my first serial protagonist. And though I spent most of my imaginative and creative time exploring concepts that were more superhero and/or sci-fi in nature, emulating my comic book and movie and TV heroes, I think it was those boy detective stories that may have shaped my career most. Dan Kotler could be the adult version of young Kevin. The boy detective all grown up—now working as an archaeologist and FBI consultant.

I’ve literally never put that together until now, but I love it so much that I have decided it is canon.

So I’ve been doing this stuff a long time, I realize. Making up stories, expressing them first to myself and then to the world. And, frankly, drifting off to spend time alone with my inner world and characters, continuing to baffle anyone who knows me in the real world. I don’t think like everyone else, I’ve discovered. And that makes some people really angry.

It’s a chronic problem we face in the world today, I’ve decided. The inability to accept that some people think differently. The inability to accept that thinking differently isn’t a bad thing, and isn’t something that we should stamp out or fight against. It’s something we should embrace. Something we should love over.

I get angry, too.

There’s a certain type of person that has somehow gained a foothold in the world. The way they think is so counter to everything I know to be good and virtuous, ethical and moral, that it repulses me. Not only do we think differently, we are fundamentally different species. Both humanoid, but both inhuman to each other.

Something I learned from reading fiction, though, has recently re-occurred to me. It’s a lesson I thought I’d learned well, but it seems I needed a refresher.

Humans, indeed all living creatures, are wired to reject the “other.” There are psychological influences and effects at work in this—things such as “the uncanny valley,” which causes us to feel a sense of creepiness and revulsion at the sight of something that looks so very close to the same as us, but is not us. We get this when watching computer animated humans who are oh so close, but there’s just something “off” about them.

The same thing happens in nature. Deer have been known to viciously attack decoys, seeing them as a threat. Dogs will often bark at statues of dogs. Animals, in general, get their hackles up when they encounter something that looks like them, but is not them.

I think that’s the sort of psychology behind what’s been happening in the US for the past several years. A growing division between us, based entirely on the fact that some people think one way, while others think another. Both believe their way is right. Both are willing to defend it, sometimes to the death.

It leads to wider division and an increase in hate.

I’ve been caught up in this, too.

That group of people I mentioned, who are so very different from me from the mind down—they look like my type of creature, but there’s something off about them. They’re not “like me.” They’re not “my kind.”

When you have two similar species that think so differently, the problem becomes communication. And if you cannot agree on the common terms, communication becomes impossible.

When two groups cannot communicate, then the inevitable conclusion is war. That’s history. That’s the end result of this stuff, always.

So how do we avoid that?

Compromise.

I can’t think like these people, exactly, but I can imagine how they think, close enough to relate. I can draw parallels. I can insist on being the one willing to work toward peace. But, of course, peace will never come until both of us can decide we are the one willing to compromise. Both have to decide that they are the one who will imagine what it’s like to be the other.

This is a bit far afield from where I started. Hazards of being a discovery writer. Like I said, sometimes I talk too much. But there is a point and a moral to this story.

No one could understand me or how I thought, growing up. I was an “other.” And there were plenty of people who didn’t like that. I had bullies, I got into fights, I had teachers who literally told friends of mine, “I never. understood a single thing Kevin ever wrote.” I was often the outsider, and often the one people ridiculed and disliked, because they couldn't relate to how I thought.

But somehow I managed to work past that.

I eventually learned how to express myself in a new way. I learned how to relate to others. I found people who thought somewhat like me, if not exactly like me. I found confidants and mentors, and I taught myself new skills. Social skills and coping skills.

I am not finished. I fail a lot at the game of connecting with and relating to people. I get angry and scared, maybe not entirely in that order, and I get frustrated. I fail to understand how someone could think and behave as some of these people do. That may never fully go away. But I’ll keep trying.

That’s what we all have to do.

Everyone, every single one of us, is an other. We all think differently. We’re all weird and outlandish. Even among our tribes, we stand out in some way. It’s the nature of reality. We’re not replicants. We don’t think exactly like any other person. We just usually think enough like other people that we allow ourselves to become one of their group. And anyone who can’t relate to at least that level is an outsider, to be ostracized and cast away.

Or, if we are evolved, to be understood enough that we become wiling to compromise and learn to accept them as part of a larger, different community. One we all belong to. One that none of us is fully worthy of.

We’re all outsiders, looking at everyone around us to determine if they are friend or foe. But the truth of it all is that the only friends and foes we have are the one’s we determine to have.

So it’s up to me to accept that other group, that other way of thinking, and to find ways to work with it.

It’s up to me. It’s up to you. It’s up to each of us, individually.

There is no peace, no growth, no community without each individual deciding to fight like hell to make it so.