Ever felt like you didn’t belong and blamed yourself for it? Maybe it wasn’t you. This blog explores the quiet power of recognizing your true nature and embracing your path.
Perhaps, You Were Never Meant to Fit In There..!
For most of my life, I carried a silent burden: the feeling that I didn’t belong. Whether it was with school friends, cousins, or even college circles, there was always this invisible gap between me and them. I used to think that something was inherently wrong with me. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe I was simply not good enough. That if I could just tweak myself, tone down here, blend in there, I might finally feel like I fit in. But that never really happened.
Until recently, I had a realisation that changed everything.
I remembered a story I had heard years ago. A farmer once found a baby eagle that had been separated from its mother. Not knowing what else to do, he placed it in a coop with chickens. The eagle grew up surrounded by chickens, scratching the ground, pecking at food, never realising it had wings meant for the sky. It thought it was one of them.
One day, a man passing by noticed the eagle and said, “This bird isn’t a chicken. It’s an eagle. It’s meant to fly.” He took the eagle to a high branch and encouraged it to spread its wings. At first, the eagle was scared. It had never flown before. But with each attempt, falling, trying, rising again, it finally soared into the sky.
That story, in a strange and timely way, became a mirror.
I realized that all those years I didn’t feel like I belonged, it wasn’t because there was something wrong with me. It was because I genuinely didn’t belong in those environments. I was trying to be a chicken when I was actually an eagle.
And this is important to say. The chickens were never wrong for being chickens. They were simply being who they were. Just like tofu isn’t wrong for being tofu. It’s a great food, nutritious for many. But if someone is allergic to tofu, no matter how good it is, it simply won’t sit right with them. It might even make them sick. That doesn’t make tofu bad or the allergic person wrong. It just means there’s a mismatch. A misalignment.
That’s what it felt like.
Over time, life slowly and gently removed me from places where I didn’t belong. Sometimes through painful detachment. Sometimes through quiet drifting. And in hindsight, I see now it was grace. I wasn’t being rejected. I was being redirected.
There’s a deep kind of peace that comes when you stop blaming yourself for not fitting in and start understanding that you were simply meant for something else. Something more aligned. More honest. More you.
And this is not about superiority. It’s not that one kind of person is better than another. It’s simply about fit. The people I was around were not wrong or inferior. They were just not my people. And I was not theirs. And that’s okay.
If you’ve ever felt like an outsider in places where you "should" have belonged, maybe you're not flawed. Maybe you’re just not a chicken. Maybe your wings are just waiting to be used.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s your time to fly.
Author Note: This story is a piece of my journey. I write not as an expert but as someone who is learning to live with more awareness, honesty, and self-compassion. If any part of this resonates with you, know that you're not alone. Maybe you are just an eagle learning to fly, too.
[Self Discovery, Belonging, Emotional Growth, Inner work, Identity, Life lessons, Authenticity]
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