Should I be just one thing?

As a kid, I have always felt the pressure to belong.

To belong.

It all started with the color of my hair and eyes. Were they black or brown? I had a medium height, but I hated the word medium in general because I wanted to be either tall or short. Was I part of the popular group in school or the “normal” one? Because I talked to both, played with both of them, liked all of my friends equally and both parties considered me as a friend and as their own.

Many questions were popping in my head but with the mind of a kid I have never thought of having a talk with myself in order to try and find answers. All of the girls in my class liked “Winx Clubs”, an animated series, so I had to go watch it in order to feel like I belonged. They all liked the same French blond guy in our class, I guess I had to like him too so that I could be part of the conversation about him and feel like I belong once again. All my friends listened to that song called “Elle me dit'' and God knows how much I hated that song but as they say “Il faut souffrir pour être belle”, I had to suffer and endure the 3 minutes and 30 seconds that song lasted, on repeat for at least two times and agree that it was a good song!

Later on in life, people would start asking you questions such as what’s your favorite genre of movies? Or your favorite cuisine? What type of music do you listen to and like the most? I hated those questions for two reasons, first of all because I couldn’t answer them- as if I never watched a movie or heard a song. Second of all, even if I could answer that would determine how I was going to be viewed for the rest of my life in someone’s head and I still don’t know who I am and I don’t know if I will like what I was going to be represented as in someone’s memory.

But wait a second, isn’t being viewed in a certain way by someone makes you belong to something? So what was the problem then? And why does it disturb me this much? I could just be and not force my brain to think about things like this! Today I am almost 22 years old, and what started with what seems to be superficial meaningless questions such as the color of my hair or my height and all of the other things I did and did not mention grew up with me and gave birth to a main and a more important question: Do I want to belong or not?

Humans are social creatures and whether we approve of the idea that we need “Others” or don’t, their existence is crucial in our lives. Whether you dislike “Others” or like them, you need them in your life because they give meaning to our thoughts and actions. They fill our living with the spices we love or the ones that we hate or both!

“Others” inspire us to write, to draw, to love, to cook, to improve and be better. You want to be the best version of yourself for your partner, or to show the people who left your life what and who they’re missing.

“Others” can bring out the worst in us, like becoming a dictator politician after being rejected from an art school and for unnecessary reasons, causing a world war that would steal the life of millions of people and leave the world with a wound that will never heal or scar. But I think that in the most hideous, horrific and terribly dreadful things “Others” can push us to do, there will always remain something meaningful, such as History for example, inspiring us to make Art.

Anyway, this could be the subject for another time because our main issue now is “belonging”. My point is that no matter how your relationship with “others” is, it doesn’t make it any easier to not belong even when you are the most introvert of all introverts.

To belong or not to belong, that is the question

About two months ago, I thought about how disappointed I was in myself because I haven’t written any other new novels from the age of 16 until now. I have always started but never finished because around the age of 16 I made the enormous mistake of being my own criticizer, a fancy word to express self sabotage.

The guilt of not having written anything “great” haunted me for a long time. I had to write a novel or else I would be a failure even when I have proven myself to be better at writing poems or essays. I forced myself for a long time to fit into the category of “novel writer” even when that wasn’t my shoe size. I was Cinderella’s sisters.

But I wanted to be Cinderella. I can’t not be the main character in my own life.

Giving this much more thought, I guess my problem wasn’t that I did or did not belong. My problem was that I was picky in what I wanted to belong to because I possibly was afraid of not being liked or afraid of being left out.

My hair is neither black nor brown, it’s somewhere in the middle. So was my height. I don’t have a favorite type of films or music. I like all kinds of food. I am not good at writing novels, at least for now. I don’t have a favorite weather and my favorite color isn’t blue as I have always told people. I am neither an over-thinker or a careless person. I am not an introvert and I am not an extrovert. I am not nice and I am not mean.

But I do belong somewhere in the middle of all this chaos and not everything in life has to be extreme and sharp.

The beauty of a color isn’t always the color itself; sometimes it’s in the color gradient. My hair, which color was lost somewhere in a palette where the two extremes were black and brown, was pretty and I do accept it now.

My brain that isn’t able yet to write a novel and refuses to write poetry isn’t any less beautiful than a brain that only writes essays, or even a brain that doesn’t write at all.

I am happy now to be growing up to be a person who does not limit herself in one film genre because I am not just a hopeless romantic who only lives for the romance, and I am not just a fearless person who likes the danger to say that I like adventure movies the most and I am not a lot of things.

But I can be all of those things all at once because I do not want to limit myself in one thing and if I do limit myself at one thing I must at least love it and shape it as it shapes me into becoming a newer better version of myself rather than letting it shape me into becoming a person I do not like or can hardly stand.

Why choose to live in the despair and misery of belonging to one thing when you can belong to everything and be at peace with yourself and cherish all the versions of yourself because you deserve to be cherished mainly by yourself.

I am beyond excited and proud to start a chapter of my life, where the words “medium” and “middle” are no longer words I hate but words I am willing and learning to incorporate in my life.

If you are or view yourself as a lost soul in this big universe, and feel like you are not classed among a specific category, leading you to question your existence and enter an identity crisis, I want you to think about water. Just like water, you can be present in all forms, solid, liquid, gas and the world will appreciate you and love you in all of your states and conditions. Just like water, you are important and beautiful in all of your states, in your flowing rivers, magical seas, deep oceans, soft fluffy snow and even in your water vapor form that transforms into water droplets giving by a series of changes beautiful rainy skies.

You do not need to be classed. And you do not need to be classified to feel like you belong somewhere.