The End Of Fitting In

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Healing From Irishness 29 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 24 days ago

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What does the feeling of “fitting in” actually feel like?

Conor Creighton 0:07

You know the feeling of sitting in is very unique. It's unique in that it's a sort of a sense of relief. I think that's how I'd characterize it. It's a little bit like the feeling you get when you've just got inside your door before a rainstorm lands. Or actually, to be more accurate, it's more like the feeling you get when you've come across a bush shelter and it's raining. because it's a sense of like, I'm safe now, but the safety is very temporary. Because this is what fitting in is really. Fitting in is a kind of a, it's a social adaptation. It's what we do to survive a moment. But we know that it's not a long-term solution because when you live a life with a strategy, where you fit in, where the strategy is to fit in.

Conor Creighton 1:32

There's never any safety because the fitting in is always dependent upon something external. Fitting in basically means I will perform myself based on the reactions on your face, you know, based on I will be whatever you want me to be. It involves a certain amount of anticipation. It involves high risk because what if you misread a face? What if you can't perform at the level you need to? What if you get something wrong? And then in that case, there's nothing to fall back on. So in this episode, I want to talk about fitting in, largely because I was terrible at it. And my fitting in began, I remember, with realizing that I was quite academic when I shouldn't have been. I always remember one of my earliest moments in secondary school, just doing very well on an exam and then realizing that by doing very well on the exam, I wasn't fitting in.

Conor Creighton 2:51

I was being exceptional. I was getting out ahead of other people. I was displaying a talent that not everybody else had. The talent was just, I was good with words and I was good with writing. This is nothing I can really take credit for. This is just how the cards lay for me. I've never really worked at this so much, writing and communicating. I've always come easy for me. I think if anything, the only thing I've ever had to work at was just the courage to actually do it. But whenever I've done it, it's always been quite easy for me. So the lesson that I learned at that very early stage was it's much safer to be average than to be exceptional. This is the very nature of fitting in. And you could say that this is sort of the unspoken contract in advertising.

Conor Creighton 3:45

Ireland and for Irish people, that it is much safer for all of us to be average, to fit in, to repeat what's come before, to be safe in our decision-making, rather than to actually allow our natural talent to emerge. Um, and if you're listening to this right now, you can already kind of begin to see that you can, you could maybe even like begin to just become aware of, well, what are some of the things that I like to do? Some of the things that I'm good at that I maybe don't do because I'm not sure how they'll be received. And this is a big problem for so many of us, because ultimately

Why is trying to fit in compared to a temporary shelter from a rainstorm?

Conor Creighton 4:36

And I think I've said this so many times that I could probably just copy and paste it from other podcasts, but that our happiness is really much based, it's dependent upon us living our natural blueprint. Your natural blueprint, you can feel it in what you're drawn to. You feel it in like the instinctive things, the weird idiosyncrasies that attract you. Yet for so many of us, we don't feel safe to follow these things. You know, for many of us, we are conditioned to try and fit in. It just feels safer to fit in. So we don't do this. I know for me, like at one level, I play different music or I play different music if other people are getting in the car with me. than what I would play on my own. If I was on my own, I would probably just listen to some weird esoteric Kybalion podcast.

Conor Creighton 5:41

Somebody talking about ancient scrolls that had some magical wisdom that was found in some, I don't know, butcher in Cairo's basement after an earthquake. I would listen to weird shit like that. Or I would have basic automatic Japanese piano music. that just calms your nervous system. That's what I would listen to.