Fitting In Keeps You Dull
Living Happy
I always tell people about how when I went to graduate school I felt like I didn’t belong. I almost quit because I felt this so very much.
It’s really hard to battle through that feeling of not belonging, right?
Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D. writes for Psychology Today,
“Belonging not only feels good—it does us good. From various physical and mental health benefits, to positive relationships and academic and work success, cultivating belonging has been shown to increase well-being.
“With its biological underpinnings, belonging often masquerades as a straightforward affair. We are, after all, surrounded by many others to link with, many chances to connect. Yet, most of us know the agony of non-belonging or, as author Zadie Smith writes, turning around during a “huge game of musical chairs” and finding no place to sit. In the brain, the social pain of severed belonging shares neural substrates with physical pain, while in body and mind it can leave a trail of adverse consequences.”
Luckily, when I was at Vermont, a couple of cool mentors told me that I should stay and give it a chance.
You can’t give up because you don’t fit in, Lisa Jahn Clough told me. And then she gave me a secret: She, the faculty member, didn’t feel like she fit in either.
That’s was a big epiphany moment for me.
Maybe people who weren’t me, people I aspired to be like, didn’t feel like they fit in either. Maybe fitting in didn’t matter. God knows, I never fit in with my family thanks to my love of all things imagination, Snoopy shoes, and complete lack of any mechanical or athletic skills.
And I didn’t really fit in where I grew up where most of the population lived in McMansions and I lived in a dark 1960s ranch that my dad built with his own two hands (and some tools, obviously). Everyone thought it was creepy and haunted. It was.
And I didn’t fit in during college either. That’s okay now. It didn’t feel all that okay then usually.
Here’s the thing: All your life someone is going to tell you that you don’t fit in. You might not get your poem into POETRY. You might not get the job. You might stand at the party and not make meaningful conversation with a single soul.
It doesn’t matter.
Not fitting in is more than okay. It’s like a super power. Being normal is overrated. Normal doesn’t change the world. Normal doesn’t create amazing things in amazing ways. Normal just is.
And you? You’re bigger that that, right?
There’s this great quote from Billy Collins that goes, “It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.”
The quote makes me a tiny bit sad because he used to believe it. I want him to still believe it. I want you to believe it too, but sometimes that’s hard to believe when the people around us, or our culture, makes us feel like being different is a bad thing.
THE DENNING TAKE
I went on a little bit of a Tim Denning kick this weekend and he wrote,
“Being normal comes with so much hidden pain.
You have to ask for permission.
You get paid less than you’re worth.
You get thrown around like a rag doll, bouncing from one thing to the next.
You get bossed by multiple bosses who exploit and manipulate you for profit.
“The temptation to be normal is enormous. Everyone wants you to fit in so they feel like they fit in. You’re told not to stress. To avoid it. To stay away from hustle culture and burnout.”
Pain is everywhere. It’s the repression of self when you try to be what others call “normal.” It’s also when people deride you for not being normal, right?
What’s important is that even when you are in the midst of that pain, you hold onto your light. That light? It’s your difference and your beauty and your quirk. It’s what makes you the glorious who that you are. And yeah, sometimes that will make you feel like you don’t fit in or belong, but belonging? That’s not where innovation or revolution or evolution comes from. It’s a lovely feeling. But you don’t have to always feel it. You can belong with yourself, your self-selected people, and you can even sometimes rejoice in how beautifully weird and different you are.
That post in Psychology Today is lovely and it speaks to trying to find belonging within. The link for that is here.