Fitting into Boxes

 A few weeks ago I was hanging out with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She put her hand on my arm and it lingered for just a moment in a tender way. I looked up and commented. “You’re not a touchy feely person. Why did you do that?” She said “I’m not, but you are.” And I felt seen and loved. And honestly, I wanted to cry.

The other day a friend commented on the fact that people grow into friendships. She commented on the fact that she herself does not put a lot of focus on feelings and emotions, and in some ways is emotionally unavailable. But then she made this friendship (with me) with someone for whom emotions were important, and she needed to grow into that a little and make space for that thing which was important to me. And I felt seen and loved.

Yet another friend commented to me recently that I needed to get out of my head. That “the people who are not accepting of you are not your people. You don't need/want them around anyway!” And I felt seen, and accepted, and, obviously a little called out 😂 but in a good way—in a way that said there was hope that I could be loved without hiding or changing myself with this person.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those moments and what they mean to me. Because I tend to feel like my primary duty in most relationships is to shrink myself into the box that best fits the needs of other people.

And maybe that’s still an appropriate thing that I need to do in some circumstances. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that when I make friends with people who are not touchy-feely that I avoid touching them because it is an attempt to respect their boundaries and ensure they feel safe and comfortable even though in some ways it limits my ability to feel connected with them.

But I also think on that friend who said that she tried to make space for my feelings even though she herself does not put much focus on those things and I think… admittedly I have withheld a lot of my emotions from that friendship because I felt it wouldn’t have been understood/valued. I told myself that we could be friends without that aspect of myself, and it’s true we have been. And I love and appreciate her for all the things that make her a wonderful person and friend. But which of our reactions to being different led to growth in the relationship? Me shrinking myself so as to not be “too much” or her expanding herself so she could accommodate me?

Which of course ties us back in to that comment by the third friend. How much time with friends am I wasting by being stuck in my head? How much of my friendships are not being experienced to their full potential because I am too worried about being too much? How much time have I wasted trying to be small enough to fit into the boxes I feel like people have available for me, when I should have moved on because the box was too small?

I don’t have an actual solution to this despite it being pointed out to me. Because I still have the feeling that the raw version of me that hasn’t been tailored to fit the masses, is too much, too needy, too emotional, too loud, too unfiltered, too inappropriate, too physical, too insecure, too different.

The irony is that I remember people in middle school talking about this feeling of needing to create different personas to fit in with different people and it never made sense to me. It sounded impossible and exhausting and disingenuous. And above all else I value people being genuine.  I was the same version of myself with everyone. Or at least I felt I was. And I was proud of it in that moment because I felt like I could be unapologetically myself all the time.

I’m not sure when that changed. I guess I realized at some point that I irritated a lot of people. And making myself smaller made me stand out less, and fly under the radar. It made me more palatable.

To some extent I still feel like I am always genuinely myself. Like I don’t change myself for people, I just don’t show them everything. Like that’s different. But I’m not sure that it is different.

Being a good friend is something that admittedly, I pride myself on, but in seeing the examples of my friends, I feel I also have to ask myself… have I been so focused on the ways I could make myself smaller to better fit people’s expectations that I have overlooked the ways I could have grown and expanded myself in order to better fit others needs? Have I overlooked the ways I could have been a better friend in the ways that were important to them, even if they weren’t important to me?

Where do you draw the line between respecting others boundaries/abilities/needs…. And respecting your own boundaries, abilities, needs?