Defining Your Own Space

When neither fitting in nor searching is working

I wrote this poem a while back about … wanting to belong rather than just to “fit in”.

It still resonates with me (don’t you love it when you write a piece like that?). The visual of taking a piece of paper and folding it meticulously so that the paper presents itself in some aesthetic pattern that’s pretty and decorative — is a metaphor too real.

And when placed in a new environment, unfolded and refolded into yet a different origami shape, the folded lines are not gone. The remnants of the old folds are still there.

In human behaviour this involves what people often label as “overreacting” or “overthinking” when those reactions or thoughts literally kept someone else safe in a different reality, and they’re just struggling to adapt to this one, which has all the same ingredients of being unsafe like the other one.

Those are the scars that are left behind.

I went through phases.

I went through a phase of folding in to fit in, and realized that while I can, it comes at a cost.

I went through a phase of searching for a space where I no longer had to fit in, one where I belonged. There were some great candidates of spaces, with great intentions, but I didn’t fit in. I wondered if I did something wrong, because these spaces were designed for someone like me to fit in. I wondered if I would never belong as a genuine human flaw rather than one as a result of the surroundings that I’m in, now that I’ve literally supposedly found the places that are supposed to be places in which I belonged.

That was a rollercoaster too.

Related posts:

Doing this for a prolonged period without a break Vision 20/20 Protocol Ebook Review leads to fatigue, headache and eyestrain. Not only eyes, our work-place ergonomics also determines our posture and…

The Gifts of Past Girlfriends All the things women I’m no longer with left behind…besides me. A lost love story by Christopher Boswell on Medium

I watched this movie called “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” in which the main characters re-live the exact same day over and over again in a loop. Because they become bored, they end up making a map…