How Much of Ourselves Do We Change to Belong?

We all change around other people.

There are ways of speaking that belong at home and others that belong at work. We behave differently with old friends than we do with people we have just met. We learn the customs of a family we marry into, the expectations of a workplace, the humour of a friendship group. Most of this doesn’t feel like compromise. It is simply part of living alongside other human beings.

Belonging has always involved some adjustment.

The harder question is how much.

At what point does adapting to the people around us become putting something of ourselves aside? And would we even recognise that moment while it was happening?

We learn belonging early

Long before we have words such as assimilation or identity, we understand what it feels like to be included.

A child notices who gets invited to sit where. Which clothes attract attention. Which lunch smells different from everybody else’s. How a name is received when the teacher reads it aloud. Which children seem to move through the playground easily and which ones have to work a little harder to find their place.

The desire underneath all of that is wonderfully ordinary. We want friends. We want to be included. We want to know that there is somewhere we can stand without having to wonder whether we are welcome.

Anna Osherov was a child when she came to Australia from the Soviet Union without English. Looking back, she describes deliberately pushing aside the things that made her different. She had no friends from the USSR and refused to speak Russian until she was fourteen.

Her description of assimilation was strikingly practical: “If you’re going to survive in this world, you have to fit in.”

She also remembers a particular entry in a Grade Five lockbox diary. She called it “Anna’s Road to Popularity.” She had decided that if she wanted the life she wanted, she needed to become friends with the popular kids. By the end of Grade Six, she had.

There is something very recognisable in that determination. Perhaps most of us had some version of a road to popularity, even if we never wrote it down.

Fitting in isn’t always the same as belonging

We tend to talk about belonging as though it means being accepted exactly as we are. I’m not sure human relationships have ever been quite that simple.

We accommodate one another all the time. We compromise. We learn that a joke we find hilarious hurts someone we care about, so we stop telling it. We discover that being part of a community comes with responsibilities as well as acceptance. We change because other people matter to us.

That kind of change isn’t necessarily a loss. Sometimes another person draws out something in us that we are very glad to discover.

But there are other changes that feel different.

A name shortened because explaining its pronunciation became exhausting. An accent deliberately softened. A language no longer spoken outside the house. An opinion withheld because disagreement carries too much risk. A tradition quietly dropped because nobody around us understands it.

Sometimes it may be something far less visible. We learn to laugh at things we don’t find funny. We become agreeable. We stop mentioning the thing we love because enthusiasm attracts the wrong kind of attention.

Perhaps the distinction isn’t between changing and refusing to change. Perhaps it is whether we still feel free to bring ourselves with us.

Some parts of us are easier to carry than others

What we are comfortable revealing can also depend enormously on the room we are standing in.

A part of ourselves can feel completely unremarkable in one place and conspicuous in another. An accent that nobody notices at home can identify us immediately somewhere else. A faith that sits quietly within everyday life can suddenly become something people expect us to explain. A surname can prompt questions that a first name does not.

Sometimes the world changes the meaning of something we haven’t changed at all.

Anna spoke about this from several directions. She is Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking, Jewish and Australian. She has had people tell her they don’t believe she was born in the USSR and others tell her they don’t believe she is Jewish. More recently, she has experienced fear around telling people she is Jewish in a way she had not experienced before.

The person hasn’t changed. The room has.

That feels important, because we often place the responsibility for belonging on the person seeking it. Be yourself. Find your people. Don’t worry what anyone thinks. They are appealing ideas, but they leave out everyone else in the room.

How much of ourselves we feel able to bring forward is affected by what happens when we do.

The stories we construct about one another

We are constantly making sense of people from incomplete information.

We notice age, clothes, accent, skin colour, mannerisms, perhaps a wedding ring or a religious symbol. We hear a profession or a suburb or a country of birth and begin adding details that were never actually given to us.

We probably couldn’t move through everyday life without doing some of this. Human beings recognise patterns. The problem isn’t that we form impressions. It is what happens when we become attached to them.

Someone tells us something about themselves that doesn’t match what we expected.

Do we become more interested?

Or do we try to make the person fit what we had already decided?

It is an odd thing to consider: that another human being can tell us who they are and we can still somehow believe our interpretation of them is more reliable.

Perhaps this is where belonging becomes something shared rather than something one person has to achieve. It isn’t only about whether I can find a way into your world. It is also about whether you have left enough room in your understanding of me for something you weren’t expecting.

A different way to ask

“Where are you from?” is one of those questions that can mean almost anything.

It can be warm curiosity. It can begin a wonderful conversation. It can also carry an expectation that there is one tidy geographical answer that will help us place the person in front of us.

For some people, there is.

For others, home has several addresses.

The place we were born may not be where we grew up. The language in which we first understood the world may not be the one we use now. A country we left decades ago may still shape how we cook, celebrate, argue, grieve or love. Another place may have become home so completely that separating the two no longer makes much sense.

Perhaps what we are really curious about isn’t where somebody is from.

Perhaps we want to know what made them who they are.

Brew the Change

This week’s Brew the Change begins there.

Instead of asking someone, “Where are you from?”, ask:

“Where does your story begin?”

Or:

“What parts of home do you still carry with you?”

Then listen for the layers — the places, languages, people, traditions, memories and experiences that have shaped them.

It is a small change in language, but it leaves the answer open. The person sitting across from us gets to decide where their story begins and which parts of home matter enough to bring into the conversation.

We may discover that the answer isn’t what we expected.

There may be a language they once stopped speaking. A place they still call home. A tradition they have returned to after years away from it. There may be parts of their story that have never needed explaining before.

And perhaps we will recognise something of ourselves there too.

Because belonging will probably always change us. Living closely with other human beings should change us.

The question I am left with is not whether we change.

It is whether the places where we belong leave enough room for us to decide what we are willing to change — and what we need to keep.

Wathc the episode on Youtube