Have you ever felt like you don't fit in somewhere? Fitting in, belonging, sticking out, moving on, holding on, looking back...
I've felt like those things encompass my whole life and I pondered it a bit last night.
Growing up, I never really fit in with my siblings. It always felt like it was a 'them against me' family and I never liked it. I often wished that I had been adopted just so I could feel like there was a purpose and reason for why I didn't feel like I was a meshing member of the family.
In church, I loved to learn. I looked forward to Sunday School, where we would be sent to our individual classes, divided by age, so that we could learn rather than sing and play Primary games. (Primary is for kids 12 and under) Each time it was a disappointment and I felt like I never belonged. The other kids would be rambunctious and rowdy, often times sending the teacher away in tears because she couldn't settle them down enough to give her lesson that she had worked so hard to plan for us. I was always hurt, and began to dread going to church, because I was so different. I wanted to learn while everyone I was supposed to be friends with wanted to goof around and play.
In Elementary school I had lots of friends of course, but one of the prominent points that I can remember is being upset because my three friends and I were practicing for a talent show, and none of them wanted to do a part that I had really hoped to incorporate. My teacher consoled me and I ended up thinking up something different and instead, my friends liked that so we went with my second choice, but I was still so hurt when I didn't feel like I belonged because of liking different things than the others did.
When I moved away, I tried to keep in touch with my friends by writing. My best friend and I wrote back and forth and sent small gifts to each other, but within a year, I never heard from her again. The others never even tried.
When School started that year, I was going into middle school for the first time (while back where I used to live, my friends were in their last year of elementary school before jr high). I had no friends yet, but the first ones I made were from church. One of the girls felt just like me and I found my first new friend. She showed me where my Sunday School class was and I saw that there were a few other kids my age in this small, new town, who also went to my church. I felt hopeful, but nervous, that I would fit in and make friends. The second friend that I made was a boy, and he was only a week or two older than me. The majority of the class was older than I was, where as in my old ward (congregation), I was in a class where I was one of the oldest. Everyone still wanted to goof off rather than learn, but they were much more subtle and sly about mocking the teacher. I hated it. Then my friends moved on from Primary as they hit their 12th birthdays and got to go to the older classes, Young Mens and Young Womens. I shared with the friend of mine who was a boy my excitement about moving on to Young Womans and not having to do an upcoming Primary presentation in front of the whole ward. My friend then pointed out, laughing all the while, that my birthday was just AFTER the presentation, so I was sill going to have to go up and sing in front of everyone with the 'little kids.' He, and the rest of the class, seemed to delight in my feeling and being left behind in the younger class.
In school that year I made friends quickly, but they were all friends "from school." I never invited them to my home except for for my Birthday, and they never invited me to theirs. The next year I made more, and different friends, and began spreading out and not sticking with any one group of friends, although always having a best friend. That summer, I moved back to Utah to live with my oldest sister and her family. I learned, then, that the friends I had had in Colorado, weren't interested in keeping in touch with me outside of school despite my efforts to call and write during the summer. Because of that, I chose to stay for the next year of school in Utah, thinking maybe I'd fit in somewhere different.
I made friends again, outside of school, and was again, excited but nervous to start school. I made more friends in school that year, my last year of middle school, but always felt a little left out because I was still learning who people where while everyone else had known each other for years and years, most of the time since they were very little. When I moved back home to Colorado, friends promised to write and keep in touch, but once again, no one did, and I felt like I had never really belonged in the first place, it was all just easier for everyone to forget about me and move on.
I moved back to Colorado just in time to start High School. I was undoubtedly scared and not excited in the least. I had left my friends for a year and they hadn't cared, and was now coming back, and... well, who was going to care about that either? I ended up making new friends that year again, but my old ones were still kind and civil to me most of the time. They just weren't the same kind of real friends that I had once thought of them because they treated me so differently. My new friends and I got along well, but I was still so very different. I didn't do a lot of the things they liked to do, and I held different morals, standards and perspectives about things than they did. A lot of my girl friends 'went out with' my guy friends, while I never 'went out' with anyone even when asked. I saw much of their stressors as true concerns for them, but in my own life, they would have been petty or unimportant (break ups and what to wear to try and impress so and so). Eventually I started to conform on some things and I fell in with the worst of them. I do commend my friends for never doing the peer pressure thing, but I do wish they had been more suggestive that I didn't try any of their bad habits. They were passive in that way. They were also passive about what I did with my life.
After finishing HS, no one cared that I up and left town. I called and wrote and even recruited my siblings to drop my friends a line for me, but none of them ever took it, none ever tried to keep in touch. Eventually I stopped trying so hard, but I never forgot them and whenever I fell across them or family members, I tried to rekindle something even if it was just to see how they're doing. I felt forgotten.
My best friend at the time hardly kept in touch anymore either. He stopped calling and I often couldn't reach him. I've only heard from once since then. Once, to tell me he was getting married. I heard from his wife once or twice after that, but never adressing me personally, more like a 'well, her name's on the list, so I may as well stick that one in there, too' type of mass message via email. I felt too disregarded to even bother.
I got married and had babies and lost my life as it was... whatever it was. I developed social anxiety and stopped going to church as often. I think in the last year, I can count on my two hands how many times I've been to church. I always felt looked at and judged, stared at, and even deeply hurt when I was overlooked twice after even speaking up and saying that I had been overlooked the first time. I can honestly say that despite having a similar faith and basic core beliefs, I have never felt like I fit in anywhere at my church, in any ward, on any given day. I don't fit the cookie cutter image and especially to those who claim that there is no cookie cutter image to fit. How mistaken they are.
Now I've moved passed an online community that I was deeply uncomfortable in, and I feel now, that I had never fit in there in the first place. I think my mistake was going there to begin with and not staying where I was happy and comfortable online. I made many wonderful friends, some new, some I had already had, but I feel like my leaving their comfortable community has only shown me once again, that I never quite belonged or truly fit in in the first place.
I often feel like this in my own family now, too. All of them and then 'me'... the person who cleans, who kisses owies and wipes butts... but who could be overlooked if I stepped into the shadows, because I was never quite a part of the puzzle in the first place. Now, I don't feel like that every day, but sometimes it's hard not to look around at things, or look back over the day and see just how much went on around me without me even feeling a part of it. My toddler counted to 9 today and I have never even heard him count before, EVER, nor have I tried to teach him... it's like I don't even need to be a mom, he's growing up so quickly that he can do it on his own... I'm just here to make sure he doesn't stick his finger in a socket. *LoL*
As with my whole life, I move or change, I'm given warm hugs and without my realizing it, it's the end of so many of my friendships, the end of my use or worth, the end of my being needed and loved... and I don't think I'll ever understand why this pattern keeps repeating in my life; why I never fully fit in, why I'm never comfortable, or fully accepted, nor missed or remembered. I have some speculative certainty that this pattern is of my own making somehow, but right now, I must be blind to it because I don't understand why this happens over and over again.
I apologize for a somewhat depressive entry. It wasn't meant to be, but after rereading it, it tends to sound pessimistic. My intention was to be relfective, and for me, it has been...
Maybe some resolution will come after reviewing this respective pattern in my life that causes me sorrow from time to time.
