Belonging, not fitting in

or pebbles, not spines

In my mind, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, is an emerald-green velvet, button-backed sofa, scattered with down-stuffed deep-red cushions; Raymond Chandler’s seminal short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is cigarette smoke, earth, frost-sharp blue skies, and denim. 

I know when a book has slipped into my subconscious because it conceives it’s own imagery and at times my mind likes to also pollinate individual words with meanings they have little objective claim to.

December is white. April is yellow. August is the colour of egg yolk. 

Fitting in is a phrase that bristles, like an aggressively-wielded hair brush.

Belonging is a large palm-warmed pebble, worn smooth by the constant shift and tumble of waves. 

Photo by Stan Adrian on Unsplash

In my mind the two words could not be more distinct, despite often being used interchangeably.

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Perhaps I’m over-sensitive to the difference between fitting in and belonging after half my lifetime living in a city I feel no connection to. Making multiple homes, sustaining a relationship, and nurturing two children in its streets, parks and buildings has failed to tether me to London. It is not exactly a stranger, but I keep it at arm’s length and feel no urge to get to know it better. A voice - occasionally a shout, at other times a whisper - commentates insistently from behind my daily routines and reflections: you, do not belong here.

This feeling might in part be due to the disconnect I feel with the identities projected onto me by others since I moved from my home city, to the South East, over two decades ago.

While at university in Canterbury, my accent set me apart and almost immediately I became known as ‘Northern’ to make a distinction from another Nicola in our circle. I quickly realised insisting Stoke-on-Trent is not in the North was meaningless to the people around me.

They hailed mostly from the South-East and routinely asked if I was from Manchester, Liverpool, or (bizarrely) Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My initial efforts to educate them edged too close to ‘weird’ or ‘taking myself too seriously’. I was in the business of fitting in so for years I answered to a name, gifted in friendship, that always felt like a lie.

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Twenty-odd years later, my family and I live in a leafy South London neighbourhood. My children attend the local state primary school where the families are from a mix of ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds, but even there I’m reminded that, while income and education position me as middle class in the eyes of many, my experiences growing up in a working class city, raised by working class parents, means my cultural reference points are not.

Owning more than one home, taking multiple annual holidays (one of them a ski trip), or panicking at the thought of sending my children to one of the very good local secondary schools we’re fortunate enough to be surrounded by, are not experiences I can relate to.

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It’s no coincidence the people I hold closest also have feet planted in different realities. In my inner circle many of our household incomes afford comforts we did not grow up with, a privilege for sure, but a disorienting one; none of us live where we grew up; many of us are immigrants, or children of immigrants; some of us are disabled, others are carers for disabled relatives. While our material circumstances differ, we’re all first generation somethings making our way through the world with no relevant model to follow.

Over our lives some of us have altered the way we dress, changed the way we speak, edited what we say and how we say it in order to fit in. There are, of course, changes it is impossible to make and I suspect most of my ‘success’ in fitting in is down to being white, able-bodied, standard-sized, straight, cis, and what would probably be considered ‘conventionally attractive’ (ick).

My Potters accent is intact in defiance of the (mostly) gentle ribbing it’s provoked; I laugh too loud, hold strong opinions, and stray often into social faux pas, so I recognise the power of unearned privileges that have made - and continue to make - it easier for me to move through spaces in which I do not belong, than it is for many of my friends and family.

That said, the pursuit of fitting in, whatever it entails, comes at a cost, whoever you are.

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Fitting in is driven by the human imperative to foster connection with other people, and to group ourselves accordingly. Evolutionarily-speaking, it’s an impulse that’s about safety and survival but, for me, safe from predators and insulated against hunger or cold, the pursuit of ‘fitting in’ has resulted in a fear of being found out. I’ve said things I do not mean, gone to places I did not want to go, and have bought more than I need, which rather than letting people in results in holding them further away.

Fitting in has required me to subject myself to a double lens, simultaneously watching myself through the eyes of others, while observing their reactions from inside my own body to see if I’m getting ‘it’ right. The contorted twists of that sentence alone, perhaps tells us something about the price of fitting in.

I’ve learned that fitting in is unintentionally manipulative and dishonest - it seeks to predetermine the way others perceive and receive me, and denies everyone full knowledge of who I really am.

Fitting in is like moving from distortion to distortion in a fairground Hall of Mirrors and not recognising myself at the end when my reflection is true.

Fitting in demands to be chased, but refuses to be caught.

Fitting in is something I’ve done - sometimes still do - my entire life, when what I need is to be.

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Be-long.

Steady and constant, quiet and still, belonging is the opposite of fitting in.

Belonging invites me to sit in silence alongside another, air empty of expectation, while beneath my skin, a glow like molten gold warms my bones.

Belonging is sliding in socks across every shiny floor and peppering speech with song lyrics. It’s repeating words until they’re meaningless just because it feels good, turning the music off, the tv down low, and talking fast and loud, but never in the first hour after waking.

It is an absence of effort.

It is the weight of a wave-smoothed pebble nestled in the palm of my hand.