Defining Your Own Space
When neither fitting in nor searching is working
I wrote this poem a while back about … wanting to belong rather than just to “fit in”.
It still resonates with me (don’t you love it when you write a piece like that?). The visual of taking a piece of paper and folding it meticulously so that the paper presents itself in some aesthetic pattern that’s pretty and decorative — is a metaphor too real.
And when placed in a new environment, unfolded and refolded into yet a different origami shape, the folded lines are not gone. The remnants of the old folds are still there.
In human behaviour this involves what people often label as “overreacting” or “overthinking” when those reactions or thoughts literally kept someone else safe in a different reality, and they’re just struggling to adapt to this one, which has all the same ingredients of being unsafe like the other one.
Those are the scars that are left behind.
I went through phases.
