Learn
How can you be yourself when everyone else seems to know how to belong?
Before lunch, you prepare three answers.
If somebody asks what you did at the weekend, you will leave out the part you enjoyed most. If they ask whether you liked the film everyone is discussing, you will say it was fine. If the group makes the usual joke, you will laugh before deciding whether it is funny.
None of these edits is large. Together, they make it possible to leave the table accepted without anyone having met you.
A Spark from The Vision
There is no need to feel out of place. Just be yourself and live life, because no one knows with surety what we are doing here on Earth.
Being yourself does not require reporting every private thought. People choose what to share, learn local customs and make small adjustments so that life with others can work. The question is what the adjustment is protecting.
Sometimes it protects communication. You explain an unfamiliar reference, wait your turn or dress for the work that will be done. The custom helps people meet.
Sometimes it protects only your place in the group. You conceal a harmless preference because it may be mocked. You agree before considering the question. You let other people supply your opinion so often that you can no longer hear where theirs ends.
Try leaving one answer unprepared. Say you did not see the film. Name the music you actually listened to. Ask why the joke is funny instead of lending it an automatic laugh. This is not a test of how boldly you can be different. It lets you see what the group does when a small true detail appears.
A welcoming group may be curious, indifferent or briefly surprised. Belonging does not require everyone to share the detail. It requires enough room for the person who supplied it to remain present.
Some groups punish more than preferences. They exclude people for an accent, body, belief, disability, class or way of living. In such a place, openness may carry a real cost. Feeling out of place can be information about the group, not evidence that the excluded person has failed at confidence.
The next choice may be to find one ally, limit what the group gets to know or leave when leaving becomes possible. “Be yourself” should never become an order to disclose what another person may use against you.
At the next lunch, the same questions arrive. You answer one of them without consulting the prepared version. Nothing dramatic happens. One person changes the subject. Another asks a real follow-up.
That is enough information for today: not proof that you belong forever, but one moment in which acceptance had something true to accept.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
Keep a Spark close
Read Spreuke on Android and receive a new Spark each morning.
