the things we do to belong.
can you really do this on your own?
hi fren, how are you really? i should be reading for my criminal law exams but i couldnât stop thinking about you, about us.
i want you to think about the first time you pretended to like something, not a big dramatic lie really, maybe letâs say where someone mentions something and you nod along and say yeah âiâm into that tooâ and inside youâre just hoping they donât ask a follow up question because you have absolutely nothing else to offer on the subject, and i want you to think about why you did it, because it wasnât really about the thing itself, it was about the feeling of being on the same side as someone, of not being the odd one out, of belonging, even temporarily or falsely to something.
i think we do this so much more than we admit and we start so early that by the time weâre old enough to notice it we canât always tell which parts of us are genuinely ours and which parts we picked up along the way just to have something in common with the people around us.
some people started watching football because their father watched it or their friends watched it and saturday afternoons were unbearable if you didnât have an opinion on a match that meant nothing to you personally, so you picked a team, arsenal maybe, or manchester united because everyone seemed to have strong feelings about them, and you learned a few names and started to feel the emotions on cue and at some point the performance became real and now you genuinely care when arsenal loses and youâre not even sure anymore whether you love football or whether you love what football gave you access to, the conversations and the group chats and the sense of being part of something with other people.
and maybe thatâs fine i guess, maybe thatâs even how most passions start, borrowed before theyâre owned, but the question i think you should ask yourself is whether you ever actually asked yourself if you liked it or whether you just kept going because stopping would have meant explaining yourself or losing access to vibes and the sense of belonging.
some people started playing call of duty or fifa or whatever the game was in their circle not because they found it fun but because the guys were always in someoneâs room playing it and if you didnât play you were just sitting there on the outside of an inside joke that never ended like it happensto me every time. and so just like me, you learned the controls and you got decent at it and now itâs just something you do, and sometimes in the middle of a session you look up and think wait do i actually enjoy this or am i just here because this is where everyone is.
some people pierced their ears because everyone was piercing things and the person they wanted to be closer to had piercings or the pinterest board they saw or the influencer they like and something about it felt like a language they wanted to speak, and maybe they love it now, maybe the piercing became genuinely theirs, but there was a first moment where it was really just about proximity to a version of cool they hadnât been invited into yet.
some people started listening to a genre of music they didnât understand because the people they wanted to impress understood it, so they studied it like a subject, learned the lyrics, developed opinions, and performed familiarity until it became real, and now theyâd fight you about it, which is funny when you trace it back to a crush or a friend group or a phase where belonging somewhere felt more urgent than being honest about what they actually liked.
some people started drinking, not because they were curious about alcohol but because every hangout seemed to involve it and standing there with a soft drink felt like wearing a sign that said i am not one of you, and so they held the bottle and then eventually they drank from it and then it became normal even though they got drunk and embarrassed. and now they donât even think about why they started.
some people stopped going to the mosque or church or stopped praying the way they used to because the environment they moved into didnât have space for it, not overtly, nobody said anything, but you could feel it, the slight awkwardness when you excused yourself, the way conversations moved on without you, and slowly you started to shrink that part of yourself to fit the room and told yourself youâd come back to it later and later keeps moving forward.
some people do fraud, and iâm not going to skip over this one because itâs common and it belongs in this conversation, not because itâs glamorous but because for a lot of people it started as belonging, being in a circle where everyone was doing it and not doing it meant being broke in a room full of people who werenât, meant being the one who couldnât afford and iphone or other things that signalled you were doing okay, and the pressure of that, of being visibly behind, of watching people around you move and not being able to move, is something that has pushed people into things they never imagined theyâd do and i think pretending thatâs not true is its own kind of dishonesty.
some people post certain things on the internet not because they believe them or even care about them but because the algorithm rewards it and the community they want to be part of claps for it and silence feels like invisibility and invisibility feels like not existing and so they perform the opinions that get them seen even when those opinions have nothing to do with who they actually are.
some people started watching kdramas because a friend wouldnât stop talking about one and they needed to be part of that conversation, and now theyâve watched 16 series of adamas and have feelings about fictional korean people that are completely real, and honestly this one turned out fine, this is a good version of the story.
some people read books they didnât finish and talked about them anyway, some people pretended to have seen films they hadnât, some people laughed at references they didnât understand and went home and googled them, some people developed opinions on things like wine or coffee or architecture not because they cared but because caring about those things was the price of entry into a room they wanted to be in.
some people became funny because being funny was the only available seat at the table, you couldnât be the richest or the smartest or the most attractive so you became the one who made everyone laugh and you were good at it and people loved you for it and it worked but somewhere underneath it was a person who was exhausted from performing and just wanted to be still for a minute without anyone thinking something else.
some people became the strong one in their friend group because someone had to be and they volunteered and now everyone brings their problems to them and they hold it all and have nowhere to put their own things down because strong people arenât supposed to have things that need to be put down.
some people changed the way they talk, the words they use, the accent they lean into or away from, not because they woke up one day and decided to but because being understood felt better than being authentic and being laughed at for how you naturally spoke felt worse than quietly editing yourself until you fit.
some people dress a certain way entirely because of the people they want to be around, not because they looked in the mirror and said yes this is me but because this is the uniform of the group and wearing it says iâm one of you without having to say anything at all.
some people became interested in crypto or web3 or forex or ai or whatever the current wave is not only because they wanted money or because they understood it or believed in it but because smart people seemed to be talking about it and not understanding it felt like being left behind so they learned the vocabulary and started using it in conversations and hoped nobody asked them to go deeper than the vocabulary.
some people started going to the gym not for health but because their entire timeline was going to the gym and not going felt like a moral failing, and they hated every minute of it for the first three months and then one day something shifted and now they actually like it, but the beginning was entirely about not wanting to be the person who wasnât doing the thing everyone was doing.
and here is where i think it gets complicated, the thing i keep coming back to, which is that sometimes you are not performing at all, sometimes you genuinely just like the thing and you arrived at liking it through the same door as everyone else and that doesnât make it less yours, passion doesnât have to be discovered in isolation to be real, you can love something because someone introduced you to it and that love can be completely genuine and thatâs okay and i think we sometimes overcorrect into suspicion of everything we picked up from other people when really the honest question is just does this still feel like me when nobody is watching, not where did it come from.
because some people found their actual taste through the process of trying on other peopleâs tastes, some people found out they genuinely love a thing by faking it until it became true, and thatâs not shameful, thatâs just how discovery sometimes works you know, messily sometimes, socially most times, through proximity rather than revelation.
but the version that i think will cost you something is when you look up one day and the thing you gave up to belong somewhere is not a music genre or a football team but something closer to the centre of you, your values, the way you used to move through the world, the things you believed, the person you were before you needed to fit, and you realise youâve drifted so far from that person that you canât quite remember the way back.
thatâs the version i think is worth paying attention to, not with guilt because guilt is not useful here fren, but with honesty, with the willingness to ask what is actually mine and what did i carry in because i needed to be let into a room and is the room even worth what i paid to get in?
some rooms are worth it. some people you wanted to belong to turned out to be your people and the things you adopted to get close to them became real and the belonging became genuine and you ended up more yourself than you were before, which sounds like a paradox but isnât really, sometimes other people are how you find yourself, sometimes belonging somewhere is exactly what you needed and it gave you things you couldnât have found alone.
but some rooms were not worth it and you stayed anyway and kept paying the price of admission long after youâd stopped wanting to be there and that is the one i think most of us are quietly carrying, the version we donât talk about because talking about it means admitting how long we stayed and how much we gave and how little we got back.
i donât think i have any advice whatsoever but i know we are all doing some version of this all the time, adjusting, fitting, bending a little here, expanding a little there, trying to be enough of ourselves to feel real and enough of whatâs needed to feel wanted, and the balance shifts depending on the day and the room and how tired we are and how much we need to feel like we belong somewhere.
i just think itâs worth knowing youâre doing it, you know...being aware of it, i think you should keep asking every now and then whether the version of you that showed up today is the one you actually want to be or the one that seemed safest to bring.
because one thing i know for sure is that the real you is still in there, waiting, not necessarily impatiently, just waiting, for you to need to fit somewhere a little less.
what are the things you did just to belong? your secrets are safe here!
THE GREEN HOUSEđ±
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This is so realll walahiđ„Č
Everyone or almost everyone has done this and I'm so guilty of it toođ
This piece is a long, breathless confession about the small trades we make for belonging.