Fitting In: It’s High Time You Stop Trying

“Is that good?” My daughter asks me for the fifth time in five minutes.

“Celaya. Seriously. Stop asking me that. You don’t need my approval. If you like it, if you think it’s good, that’s all that matters.”

Five minutes later… “Is that good?”

Picture me smacking my forehead with my palm.

My daughter is an empathetic people pleaser. She has always been that way. This personality trait is one of many that urges people to worry about fitting in. She wants to make me happy. She wants to make everyone happy. For her six short years of life, I have slowly but surely been nudging her toward embracing her own sense of self, her own sense of completeness, her own self love.

She’s getting there.

It is one of the reasons I am so happy to be homeschooling. She is prime pickings for friends, teachers, and administrators to manipulate and twist into what they want her to be, drowning out almost completely her own inner voice.

Fitting In and the Inner Voice

I’ve watched this happen to many children, not just people pleasers like my daughter. They turn to their parents, teachers, friends for approval.

I’ve also met several adults still working hard to fit in, desperate to find approval and find success in the world through being “liked.”

And there is nothing wrong with wanting to be liked or loved, with wanting to fit in, with wanting to belong to a community. Human connection is one of the greatest things about our life experience. Indeed, when we connect and intertwine completely with someone, in that awesome yin yang way, the gods and the heroes cheer us on from Valhalla.

The problem begins when we drown out our own inner voice in the name of fitting in. When we forget that our own self love has to be first and foremost.

In the interest of seeking approval and fitting in, we give up on our dreams, our goals, our desires, and we sell ourselves far far short of who we originally hoped to be.

I read somewhere once that the definition of hell would be who you are, on the day you die, meeting who you could have been.

If only you had let go of all the bullshit you let block you.

You Are Perfect

We are all born with an inner voice that knows how perfect we are. I call it the energy that creates worlds, the source of all creation – the larger part of us. It is inside us and all around us, and we always have direct access to it.

That inner voice is loving and good and purely positive only ever.

You might call this God, the Universe, Spirit, or so many other names.

The bottom line is, when we feel sad, angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, left out or any other negative emotion, it is because we, with our “practical” human brains, and our lying human egos, are in disagreement with our inner voice.

Your inner voice will never ever agree with you that you are anything other than worthy. Your inner being will never judge you or scold you or correct you. You are perfect, always.

So when you feel lonely, you have turned away from your inner voice.

Fitting In: Years of Training

“37 years, Shanna. I’ve believed these things for 37 years. It’s going to take time to undo it all.” My husband says to me quite often when I’m pointing out that he can let go of one particular block or another, that his negative emotion is counterproductive to his dreams.

He’s right though. We’ve spent our whole lives wrapped up in lies that have come from outside of us telling us we have do A, B, and C in order to be worthy, or that we have to follow these or those rules to be considered “good.”

The lies come from well meaning parents, teachers, bosses, advisors, therapists, friends, lovers, government, you name it. We live in a world that for centuries upon centuries has insisted on a conforming society. The wheels were put into place long, long ago and most of us are all merely widgets in the wheels.

“You’re not good enough, skinny enough, light skinned enough, dark skinned enough, smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, nice enough, mean enough rich enough responsible enough” and on and on.

And those lies get continually reinforced and contradicted and twisted until we come so far away from our own inner voices that it feels hopeless. We will never ever measure up to expectations put in place by people who do not know us and do not live our lives.

Ignore the Liars in Your Head

Don Miguel Ruiz discusses this system in his book The Voice of Knowledge. He draws an analogy between the liars in our heads and the people in the head of the schizophrenic character in the movie A Beautiful Mind.

The voices in the character’s head almost ruin his life. Once he realizes the voices are not real though, he simply decides that he will not listen to them. Yes, of course, the voices are still there, but the longer he can hold out not listening to them, the quieter they become, and over time, they stop talking altogether.

This ignoring of the liars is what we need to do.

Yes, it will take time and concerted effort to get rid of those lies in our heads. But it’s worth it. Oh it’s so worth it.

Fitting In: Love Yourself First

It all begins with self love. When you believe that you are worthy, when you love yourself so much that you never, never, judge or criticize yourself for anything you do or have done, you are in total alignment with your inner being.

When you are in total alignment, you don’t need anyone else to like you or love you.

BUT! You are now so full up of love that it spills over, and you just want the same for everyone else around you – for them to love themselves. So there you go, loving and giving and being love.

And then guess what happens: like moths to a flame, people fall in love with you.

There’s this great song by the Irish Blues singer Hozier called “Someone New.” The main chorus says “So I fall in love just a little bit every day with someone new.” And the breakdown at the end repeats about five or six times “Love with every stranger, the stranger the better.”

And every time I hear the song, I think “yea, that’s what I do.” I fall in love with someone new every single day. Sometimes many people!

I fell in love with a mom and her little family today when I went to pick up my dinner from Chipotle.

I walked in and saw her with her three small kids and her husband.

I touched her arm lightly as I approached. She turned her head.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked, smiling. “What’s it like to have three?”

And then we struck up a conversation about having small kids, how once you have two you may as well have ten, and so on. We laughed and smiled, and then I grabbed my food and left. It was great.

Forget About Fitting In

So all those things you want to do, the impulses you get that you hold back from because you’re worried “they’ll think I’m weird,” or “no one else does this,” or “what if no one likes me,” or “I could never,” do them.

Do them all.

Fall, fail, feel, and then fly.

And you probably will fall and fail and feel. A lot. If you’re out of practice, if you’ve been out of practice for 37 years, or more, you’re gonna get dashed on the rocks a few times before you puff out your chest and say to hell with it.

Because here’s the secret: once you forget about fitting in, you actually will fit in with all the other weirdos and crazies and adventurers and wild ones out here. All of the people who have decided to love themselves no matter what and love everyone else in the same way, will love you, too, and you will become part of the group of misfits that is growing rapidly and will soon take over the world.

The rules are, there are no rules.

The only way to get there is through self love, and all paths are open to you after that.

The greatest thing about it all is that no matter how far you have fallen away from your inner voice, once you turn around, turn back toward your own self love and that pure positive energy, it’s waiting for you. It’s been there all along. It never left you.

And then?

And then you fly.