Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

The fitting in is exhausting

I was on a walk in my neighborhood when it landed.

A Mel Robbins podcast was playing through my earphones, her conversation with Seth Godin, and Seth was talking about how we wait to be picked. By employers. By audiences. By clients. By the right person at the right moment. How the waiting itself is the thing keeping us small.

I slowed down, because I realized I have been waiting to be picked my whole life, and I am only now noticing what the waiting has cost me. The fitting in is exhausting.

“ The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. — Carl Jung

From My Chair to Yours

I was a dancer. My friends were athletes.

That sentence took me forty years to write honestly. For most of my life I told it differently. I told it like I was also an athlete, just a less successful one. Junior varsity everything. I would sit in the bleachers and watch their varsity games and then go out and play my own junior varsity version of whatever sport they were good at. The most vivid sports memory I have is the 'sports injury' I experienced....a splinter I got from a light post when I tripped heading into the dugout after striking out in T-ball.

I didn't enjoy sports. I thought I had to play them to fit in.

I wasn't an athlete. I was friends with athletes. And being friends with athletes asked something of me. It asked me to adjust; my interests, my attention, my sense of what counted. I did the adjusting. I called it friendship. I didn't know it was a price.

The fitting in was exhausting because it was never going to work. I was a dancer trying to pass as an athlete. I was a girl writing herself into the in-crowd by editing herself down. I was performing a version of belonging that required me to be someone I wasn't, in rooms that were never going to fit me, with people who were doing their own version of the same performance.

And here is the part I am only now seeing clearly. My friend group that is shifting now, in real time, isn't loss. I am simply done editing myself for the room.

The Lens

I realized on that walk that waiting to be picked is the adult version of fitting in.

We don't outgrow gym class. We just get more sophisticated about it. We wait to be picked by employers. By friend groups. By family members who never quite saw us. By a future version of ourselves we keep hoping will arrive and make us legitimate. The mechanism is the same one we learned at ten years old, standing against a wall in a school gym, hoping our name gets called next.

The cost of waiting to be picked is that we are not the ones doing the picking. Someone else is. Some imagined gatekeeper. Some unnamed authority. Some collective verdict we are still waiting for. And while we wait, we contort. We perform. We edit ourselves into shapes we hope will be chosen. We carry the anvil of needing to be selected by people whose selection requires us to be less than we are.

Picking yourself is not arrogance. It is not self-promotion. It is the quiet, almost ordinary act of stopping the wait. It is the moment you notice that the gatekeeper you have been performing for does not exist. Or worse, that the gatekeeper does exist, and the cost of being chosen by them is the version of you that would actually be worth choosing.

Picking yourself, then, is becoming the chooser instead of the chosen. It is choosing what rooms to enter, what to bring with you when you enter them, what to leave on the floor at the door. And then doing it again tomorrow. And again the day after.

The friend group shifting around me right now is not the punishment I would have called it twenty years ago. It is the consequence of finally picking myself. Some people will not want the version of me that is not performing belonging. Some people will. And the ones who will are the ones I get to actually know.

That is not loss. That is the beginning of being seen.

Reflection

Three questions to sit with this week:

• On where you're still waiting: Where are you still waiting to be picked? Not by an employer, necessarily. By a friend. By a family member. By a future version of yourself who hasn't shown up yet. What would it look like to pick yourself there instead? Quietly, today, without announcement?
• On where you're still performing: Where are you a dancer pretending to be an athlete? Where are you sitting in the bleachers of someone else's actual life while performing a junior varsity version of it for yourself? What would the dancer in you do, if you let her stop pretending?
• On the choosing itself: What does picking yourself look like today? Not as a big decision, not as a declaration, but as a single small choice? The email you send instead of waiting to be asked. The opinion you keep instead of soften. The plan you make for yourself instead of waiting for someone to invite you. What is the smallest possible version of choosing yourself you could do before the day ends?

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight

P.S. The Mel Robbins Podcast conversation with Seth Godin is worth your time if any of this resonated. Seth closes with a line I'm taking with me into this next chapter: Now go make a ruckus.