When I Stopped Trying to Fit In

The great thing about college is that you get to let go of the cliques and taunting. There’s more on the horizon. You get to find your tribe, the people who are more in line with what you value. Yet… yet my desire to fit in didn’t fade.

At twenty, as a reborn Christian, I felt like I didn’t quite fit in with all the church folks. I had so much to learn, they knew way more about Jesus than I did. They hadn’t done half the awful things I had done, and our families were different. I had watched Smurfs and HeMan! Lol. I still taunt my husband a little about his lack of ’80s cartoon knowledge. But seriously, even amongst people who loved me, I felt like I didn’t fit in. Which led one to ponder, was it me?

I began to learn that my past experiences molded my current perceptions. Once you’ve been rejected, especially at a young age, and especially by someone you love, it slants your thinking. You walk around either fearing love, craving love, sabotaging love, feeling you’re never loved and never will be loved, or all of the above. Parents should consider this before they dip out on their kid, but it goes beyond that. It’s like hurt just piles on hurt, piles on hurt. You end up like me, seeking acceptance, but never quite feeling like you get it.

I don’t think I can pinpoint when it happened, but one day I stopped caring so much what people thought. As I grew older and matured I realized what was important to me. I held those things close and didn’t put as much value in the things that didn’t matter. I discovered who I was according to Jesus, and I realized the opinion of anyone else didn’t matter. I learned to love myself because of how God saw me. Then I didn’t crave love from man to make myself feel better, yet I was also able to accept love from others more easily.

As I kept going in this vein I realized that I was a unique creation of God, that He made me a certain way. So although hurts along the way may have changed my actions and perceptions, I also was who I was because He created me that way. Special. Different. These were no longer bad things, but worthy of celebration. I didn’t need to fit into the box. It was cool to be a square peg in a circle hole world. I didn’t have to fit the mold, and I could break out of the constraints of trying to fit in and be anyone other than me.

But it kept going. I also started to understand that sometimes my vision could be clouded and that the devil could use lies to make me feel like I didn’t fit anywhere. Maybe I wasn’t an introvert by design, but rather by choice. It’s easier to be a loner when people are mean, but it’s also less painful to stay that way and believe everyone is mean. I had missed out a lot over the years. I had missed so many opportunities to be kind and show God’s love to others because I was tired of being hurt.

Through it all, I had gone from rejected to social misfit, and from introvert to [a] major lover of people. That’s what God can do, I suppose. I am grateful I came to a place where I stopped trying to fit in, but I am even more thankful when I came to the point of realizing I also couldn’t sit life out.