Misfit? Or Mismatched?

Maybe you’ve always felt a little awkward, clumsy, or off-center among certain groups of people.

Maybe you’ve found connection hard and effortful to create and maintain. 

Maybe instead of feeling ignited and full, you find yourself drained of all your energy by the end of each day. 

Maybe you’ve been told you are too much, not enough, too sensitive, too intellectual, too controversial, too deep, too plain, too slow, too fast, too loud, or soft, too serious, too anything, and you struggle and struggle not to be that thing, but it doesn’t seem to work.  

Maybe you feel at odds with your life, something is not quite right, and you’re not quite fitting.

Maybe you’ve felt pieces of that.

I’ve felt pieces of that.  Then recently, I had an epiphany. 

I have this friend (this time it really is a friend) who has sometimes experienced herself as being “too much’’.  She’s different from most people you would regularly meet.  She thinks of herself as a wall flower yet takes up almost all the metaphorical “space” in a room, even when she has not said anything.  She dresses unexpectedly, speaks in a way that seems abrupt but has the power of cutting to the truth, and always shows up with eye shadow and fake lashes, even to go to a fitness class.

She is not like most people, and many people have been confused by her, even discounted her, and somewhere along the way, she learned to discount herself.

But she writes.  Poetry. 

After raising a bunch of kids, and now deep in her forties, she pushed aside the voices that told her she didn’t quite fit, that something was wrong with her, and put herself, through her writing, out into the world.

And she got accepted.

As we speak, this friend of mine is attending a prestigious weeklong poetry conference for an elite and highly select group of poets.  What I keep hearing through the lines in her texts is that she has found her place, the place she was made for, a world that reflects who she is, where there are others like her, and where she perfectly fits. 

I think, for some of us, that’s it, isn’t it?  We feel like misfits, until we find the spaces we were built to fit in. 

We might experience the sense that something is wrong within us when all along we were just in the wrong place.

I’m not saying we should blame our environment for everything that does not feel right in our lives, I don’t believe that at all. I’m pro taking responsibility for our own lives, but sometimes our existential fear of being alone (we cannot survive if we are alone) means we have a deep need to belong, and it is this need that motivates us to try to “fit” ourselves in to… well, whatever space we are in.

We often opt to surrender what might be our unique gifts, and our power, to fit into a certain group or environment that does not always support who we are. We become hard on ourselves, hating, struggling, and fighting ourselves, dulling the edges of our being, our personalities, in order to fit into our surroundings.   

The part we may need to question is, what are we trying to “fit” ourselves to? And is it really working for us?

Maybe wherever we are is not the place we are meant to be, or is a space we may have fit once, but may have subsequently outgrown. 

A light example might be you are spending time with a group of women who love to gossip.  And maybe that’s not something you feel fulfilled by.  Maybe you get the message that you’re too uptight and ruin the fun because you don’t engage in the gossip, or maybe they don’t invite you over as much as a result. Or maybe because you love these friends and want to be “fun” & belong, you gossip with them.  But over time you come away feeling depleted after each hangout.  Exchange “gossip” with anything, like, “sports”, “wine”, “complaining”, “politics”, “pets”, and you get the picture.

Many of us have also experienced another kind of misalignment when we outgrow old versions of ourselves.  Some of us experience this with our families of origin.  For example, once you’ve moved out of your parental home and created your own separate life, do you ever notice how you revert into old versions of yourself when you visit your family?  Or even old friend groups, for that matter?  You are triggered to act in ways you used to, but which are no longer you?  Do you get the “you’ve changed” guilt-tripping manipulation to change back? 

The groups you belong to, families, social circles, work, gyms, organizations, all want you to be a “version” of yourself that fits their specific structure, culture, needs, and values.  They find ways to pull you into their way of being through guilting, shaming, and perpetuating hierarchies like “popularity” and “success”, but the ultimate hold they have over you is the threat of not belonging.

There are also internal pulls that keep us where we are.  A big one is not wanting to let go of old commitments and identities; Old parts of ourselves, the “kind of people” we identify ourselves as being, who we thought we were.  Sometimes the thing we are trying to fit, is the old version of ourselves. We become attached to old identities.  Letting them go is frightening.  On the other side is the great unknown.  But also on the other side, is possibility.

We may require a different soil in which our unique edges can flourish.  One that can hold the best, most powerful parts of us.   A place where we might develop into the people we were meant to be.   There might be a different place that resonates more deeply with what we currently need or who we are becoming.

I am not saying just leave the spaces you are at.  I am not saying break up with your current life and pursue another.  But I am saying be aware when your current environments pull you into being a constricted version of who you really are.  Learn to recognize your own gifts instead of diminishing the parts of you that don’t fit.  Maybe we can challenge our environments to shift, to open to these other parts of us, or maybe we find new spaces that can support all of who we are. 

I am saying maybe it is time to stop contorting ourselves to belong.  I am saying we must be loyal to ourselves first, and until we do, we will always be misfits.