My friend Amy shared a video with me this morning about a boy named Josh who was previously bullied after losing his dad, but one day decided to open doors for people, and it changed his life. It was the typical tearjerker, emotional piano music in the background, only watch this shit on your period type of video. Don’t get me wrong, it was wonderful and totally affirming (you can watch it here), but I’m not really a touchy-feely kind of girl. I usually just smile, watch a few seconds and then click out before the waterworks start.
But, about a minute into the video I was half-assedly listening to, Josh said something that stuck.
“I didn’t feel this was my place to be.”
At the time, he was sitting alone in a lunch room, completely shunned and mocked by his peers. But, there is also no better descriptor for parts of my life than that exact phrase. First, chill. You aren’t my therapist Tom, and I’m not going to lay on your couch and talk about my all feelings in high school. But, there is just so much power in hearing someone else say it.
The majority of my Junior High and High School experience was feeling like it wasn’t “my place to be.” I tried to mesh into many different groups, and the majority of my relationships were short-lived and a struggle. I was overly accommodating and pleasing and inauthentic because I thought it would make people like me, even though I didn’t really fit into what I was trying to be a part of. It ended up feeling forced and unnatural as I desperately tried create just enough of something to get through it.
College was the same way. I didn’t join any clubs or sororities. It always felt like I had some sort of secret I was hiding, even though I had absolutely no idea what it was at the time. Maybe it was my weight, or that I was broke or that I wasn’t even a good friend.
Not fitting in or having “a place to be” doesn’t end with your teen years. As an adult I’d watch as so many other adults around me began to once again fall into their “place.” Work friends who go out for happy hour once a week. Adult softball leagues. Church organizations. There is a group of girls from high school who have remained very close after graduation; getting together for vacations and holidays and their children’s birthday parties. They share photos online, tagging each other and looking so happy and full, and it would make me incredibly sad and jealous. They clearly had something real between each other, and I didn’t. No actual sustainable connection.
Once I had kids, it was easier to be without a “place” because I was so preoccupied with keeping babies alive. I threw all my free time into them not only because I loved them, but because I really didn’t have anyone else. I literally had to make my own friends, like, with my body. Eventually I got online, creating this space where you are today, learning and growing and changing the environment around me. Once again, making something where before there was nothing. Finally finding “my place to be.”
I will never be someone who lucks into “my place,” and there are tons of people like me out there. Grown ass adults with no clue where they fit in this world. You can tell it’s us by the way our face lights up like a dog going for a car ride when you invite us to lunch or the excessive laughter we produce in response to your marginally funny joke. It sometimes reads as desperate or annoying, but that’s not our intent. We’re just looking for our “place.”
If I could build a time machine, I’d go back in time to do two things. 1. Tell teenage Brittany it’s okay that she feels like a phony outcast. Not fitting in isn’t a personal failure on her part. School just isn’t her place, it won’t come for a few more decades, so in the mean time she needs to sit back, be herself and consider writing a book about boy wizards. 2. Put into motion a series of events that would prevent Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson from divorcing.
Personally, having a heads up that in order to feel accepted I’d have to make my “place” myself would have been helpful and saved me loads of time. But, that’s neither here nor there at this point. Bottom line, relying on yourself and building your own community doesn’t make it any less real or authentic. Throwing in my face that the majority of my friends are online isn’t an insult, it’s a fact. My place is here. Sometimes it has a dot com, sometimes it’s a stage. Soon it will be a book shelf, and twice a year it’s in the middle of the woods. Vastly different surroundings for one common reality, I am in “my place to be.”
I never felt I had a place either.
I like it here. *snuggles in*
I felt this exact same way. I have some friends from school years, but not a ton. I love the internet so much because of the ease of finding people more like me. Maybe that’s why I when I met you in Florida last year I felt a bit awkward. It’s like meeting the person who writes the words in your brain and you sort of feel like a weirdo and excited all at the same time. Keep writing and using your voice. It helps make my little world in the internet that much better.
This touched my heart. I have never fit in and at 31 i still don’t. But im learning that it’s ok. Love this post.
“You can tell us by the way our face lights up…when you invite us to lunch or the excessive laughter we produce in response to your marginally funny joke.” THIS!
How could you describe me so clearly? The need to say YES to every invitation because I’m terrified I won’t be invited again. I have always felt awkward around people. I was extremely shy when I was younger, and have always had trouble fitting in and making friends.
I still dread the long pauses in conversations over the phone. I tend to over-share very quickly, almost like daring could-be friends to walk away, and many have. I am working hard on this bad habit. I don’t need to confess my deep dark secrets to everyone.
Thank you so much. You have a wonderful gift for writing and I love that you created a place for all of us awkward “teenagers” in our 30’s, 40’s and beyond, where we can feel comfortable dropping by unannounced.
<3
Shared!!
Some of us adults are still trying to find a place we fit in, not for lack of trying but from lack of something although we really have no clue what that something may be… Hopefully we all find that place or at least learn to accept it for what it is. I am glad you have found yours, reading your blog shows me you deserved it.
Those high school friends, always together and posting happy happy joy joy photos? It’s like their lives are photoshopped. NO ONE is that happy, has that level of perfection. Everything is edited for online use, like “Look at me! I’m perfect!”
I’ve found that even those people have struggles. They have moments of sitting on the toilet, massive diarrhea shooting out of their asses. They sometimes start their periods in the middle of their kid’s school program. I have struggled to find my place my entire life, and I”m realizing now that we all do. We’re all in the fake-it-until-you-make-it stage, trying to find our authentic selves, and I am so glad we have heroes like you to tell us that you can be totally awesome (like you), beautiful (like you), and have success (like you), but still struggle with who we are. It’s the human condition, and we’re all in it together.
Your blog is the number one reason I realized that your twenties really are about finding out which friends are truly there for you. And that it wasn’t me, and that it wasn’t my fault people were shitty friends. That it was a combination of life getting in the way and people that were mismatched to begin with. And sometimes you have to make your own place.
I am so excited that #2 on your things to go back in time and do is keep Jessica and Nick together. I think the world would be happier with them as a couple.
I was DEVASTATED when Nick & Jessica divorced!
ps. As a chiclephobia sufferer I can’t read the top of your posts because I have to scroll down quickly so I don’t see your pic with the gum. Ew.
pss. But I still LOVE you & your blog ;)
This entry really hits home for me. I had a friend of 11 years. She was one of my groomsmen. She and I were close. We knew were the other had buried the bodies. We knew each others secrets. Over the last few years though. Our relationship had just become incapsulated in text messages. We probably live 20 minutes away from each other. Last year was tough. Frankly this year isn’t looking much better. Last summer, I asked her several times to hang out. She would give me non answers. “I don’t know when and what time will be good. Let me get back to you.” I asked her to visit me at the hospital several times. I had 5 spine surgeries last year. She never did. I begged her to hang out for her to do more than text and how she hurt me by not getting together with me.
Last November, I was back at work from having been gone a year where we both worked. I hadn’t seen her in that time. She and I were in the cafeteria. She didn’t recognize me. My general appearance hasn’t changed that much at all. That moment hurt.
So it was about maybe a month ago, she didn’t understand one of my texts that made clear sense to me. It hit me. I don’t need a local friend who won’t see me. When I have many online friends would love to meet me and hang out with me. So with my trusty iPhone, I moved her into the blocked callers section and I decided to move on. The friends you may meet through Twitter, Huffington Post, Instagram maybe far away. Sometimes they listen and care when you have no one.
Thank you for your continued brilliance and awesomeness.
Your writing is very relatable. As an overweight, stay at home dad / husband who is dealing with some health issues. Seeing what you do always seems to give me that nudge forward when I need it.
I love your text, because it is so on the point. And I just realized that you read so many similar things on a lot of blogs. Similiar expieriences, similiar voices. I am one of them. And grateful that we now in our time and age have the opportunity to express ourselves, over the Internet or other channels that we who “are missing our place” hadn’t had in the past. I think we are a bigger group than we think but because we are often shy or awkward or feel like we don’t belong we can’t find each other even if we were looking. Blogs like yours make the looking much more easier! Thank you for that!
Love,
Annika from themuffintop-less.blogspot.de
Today, I really needed this. My daughter is struggling with this exact concept (and making some really poor choices because of it) and I have had the same struggle to find my “place” as well. Now that I’ve created my own place, the hindsight is tremendous but I do not know how to best convey that and teach that to my daughter. I know there are bumps and hiccups in getting there and I hope I can help her as she finds her place.
Im 35 and I still really dont know where I fit! I have two young girls and I really hope I can just impart to them that it’s all okay and to not take everything so seriously. Perspective at 35 is so much better than at 16! High school ends, college ends. Life is good, be yourself and love your quirks!
I TOTALLY feel the same way about that group of girls from high school. I’m not really friends with ANYONE I was friends with in high school. Fuck it.
Thank you darlin, for this place.
<3
So happy you found you place here. It’s a gorgeous place!! xo
God Damn. I only recently found your blog, but almost everything I have read feels like my alter-ego wrote it. So, thanks for that! It’s nice to read the things I feel but can’t put into words.
So awesome! I am a fake extrovert. Really, I would just rather be left alone and hang with my family and tiny group of friends who get me. But in the world, I exhaust myself being cheerful and super friendly and eager. I keep reminding myself that I have to start being okay with me and not constantly worried about keeping up the appearance of “me.” Thanks for this!
[…] of my favorite bloggers, Brittany, Herself., posted a profound piece yesterday, called The Internet is a Place. For Real. You may want to read her piece before you read the rest of this […]
You know, I’m 45 and still struggle to figure out where I fit in and what I want to be when I grow up. It is exhausting, but I also look at it as a gift. I am constantly striving to grow as a person and find new ways to explore who I am. I would much rather be someone who is spiritually restless than someone who never questions where they fit it, what that means, or even if they should!
As Julia Child once said, “Live a curry of a life!”
P.S. I wonder how many of us here on your blog are Meyers Briggs INFJs?
Hi! I’m one.
Ah! I was just getting ready to write the same thing, but with a different personality type! After struggling through 2 decades of depression and feelings of isolation, Penelope Trunk finally figured out I’m an INFP…I’m built to feel like that! What a damn load off my shoulders. Every child in school needs personality typing. Which is the topic of my next guest post, wherever it lands :-)
I’m currently trying to find my new place. In my mid 20’s and 30’s I found my place, my friends, husband, job……life. And at 39 I got pregnant and had my first baby, then had my second at 41. In the past few months I’ve realized that my place (with the exception of my husband and family) has totally changed. I don’t see the majority of my old friends anymore, they don’t call or come around and I’ve been told it’s just where I’m at with my kids right now, that when they are a little older it will get better. Well, I’m kind of realizing that I’m not sure I want the same friends. The ones that weren’t there for me during the dark times after my second son was born, who may have commented on a FB post but never called to see if I was ok, or came to visit. The ones that never include me in all their girl stuff. I’m creating a new place, right now, that mostly revolves around my boys and my husband……..being a Mom and Wife. And it’s starting to be ok.
This was really well written and I think so many people can relate to this. Thank you for sharing. I have to say, I’m ambivolent about Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson but I would do just about anything to go back and prevent Brittany Spears and Justin Timberlake from splitting up. I am pretty sure it was the night they wore matching denim outfits on the red carpet to MTV music video awards. If I could just somehow manage to go back to that night……