I spent most of my life trying to fit in.

Looking back, I can trace it to a moment when I was fourteen.

My family had moved, and I was the new kid in a small Louisiana town. I eventually found a group of girls at school. We ate lunch together, spent time together on weekends, and I even started going to church with them.

One weekend we had a sleepover and went to church the next morning. I remember having a really good time, or at least I thought we did.

A few days later, two girls from the group handed me a note.

I don't remember most of what it said. I only remember one sentence:

"You don't fit in with us. You need to find somewhere else to sit at lunch."

I threw the note away. Not because it didn't hurt, but because I didn't want my mom to find it.

She had always told me, "Just be yourself and people will like you." I didn't want her to know that maybe they didn't. I didn't want her to think she had failed somehow, or spend time wondering what was wrong with me and what she could have done differently.

So I threw the note away and pretended it didn't matter.

I remember sitting by myself after that, watching people and studying them, trying to figure out what I had done wrong and what I needed to change.

At fourteen, I started learning how to read a room. I paid attention to what people liked, what they accepted, and what made someone belong. I got pretty good at it. The strange thing is that it became so normal I stopped noticing I was doing it.

When I met new people, I paid attention to what they talked about, what they valued, and what made them comfortable. I learned how to emphasize certain parts of myself and keep other parts quiet.

I wasn't trying to be fake.

I was trying to belong.

The problem is that when you spend years adjusting yourself to fit the people around you, eventually you start losing track of where the adjustments end and you begin.

I carried that habit into friendships, church, work, and almost every room I walked into. Not in obvious ways. I still had my own thoughts, questions, and opinions. I just didn't always share them. Some things felt easier to keep to myself, especially the things that might make other people uncomfortable. Over time, I became known for the parts of me that felt safest to show.

The more I've allowed myself to ask questions over the last few years, the more I've realized that many of those questions weren't really about faith. They were about belonging. About whether people would still accept me if they knew all of me. Would they still stay if I said what I actually thought? Would they still want a seat beside me if they knew I didn't have all the same answers they did?

For a long time, I wasn't sure.

What I'm learning now is that there is a difference between being liked and being fully known.

Being liked feels good.

Not having to hide feels even better.

Looking back now, I can see something I couldn't see at fourteen. Those girls were cruel. There's no way around that. But they were also kids.

And the truth is, I probably didn't fit in with them. Not because there was something wrong with me, and not because there was something wrong with them. We were simply different.

What took me decades to understand is that not fitting in isn't always a problem that needs to be fixed. Sometimes it just means you're sitting at the wrong table.

For years, I thought the answer was to change myself, to adjust, to edit, and to become whatever version of me would be accepted.

Now I see things differently.

I'm a little weird, a little quirky, and I ask a lot of questions. I think about things more deeply than some people would like. And you know what? That's okay.

That's who I am.

For most of my life, I kept trying to squeeze myself into places that didn't quite fit. Now I just look for the table that has an open seat for me.

I've learned that not every table was meant for me to sit at. And that's okay. The right friendships don't require me to become someone else first.

The right friend will move over and say, "There's room here."