It’s the beginning of the school year; new classes, fresh faces, and plenty of opportunities to meet new people. You take advantage of arriving to class early and start talking with a group of people sitting around you.
You instantaneous really connect with the group and think to yourself, “this is a group of people I can really picture myself hanging out with.” You immediately start forming plans for all the things you guys will do together over the semester; study dates, wine nights, gossiping over each other’s’ love lives. The longer you guys talk the more and more you believe that your plans will actually come true.
Flash forward to spring semester and once again you have a class with the same group that you met the past semester. Over the past few months, the group has held wine nights, study dates, and plenty of inside jokes were made. The only thing is, most of the time it didn’t include you and now you sit in class next to them and listen as make plans for another weekend together.
You sit there, you listen, and you wait, hoping that someone will make eye contact you, that maybe they’ll feel guilty about you overhearing them making plans, and that one of them will finally throw out an invitation for you to join into their plans. It never comes. Once again you walk out of class at the back of the group and watch as they all leave to go study together. You walk the other direction wondering coming up with ideas of all that is wrong with you to be the only one that didn’t make the cut after meeting each other that very first day…
The feeling of not making the cut, it makes you feel inadequate, unlikable, and lonely. It confirms all the beliefs you have about yourself being boring, forgettable, and not possessing a single trait that would make you a more desirable friend than someone else. All you had wanted was to be liked by that group, so badly, you had invested so much of your hope and formed so much excitement from the expectations you had made, and now you just feel like an outsider.
Your thoughts and feelings are consumed by the feeling of rejection as their snaps and Instagram posts of all of them keep replaying in your head. Only focusing on the friendships, you wanted but don’t have clouds your ability to truly appreciate the connections and friendship that you have made this semester.
The disappointment and faultiness you feel from your expectations and plans for this semester not panning out causes you to undervalue the friendships and connections you have made that were not planned. You cannot see that people and connections you have made just living life because they were not part of the plan, they were not the people you had originally wanted to be your people.
To all of you that feel faulty, unlikable or an outcast because you were the only one that did not make the cut, I want you to know that it is not true. I know the feeling though, I know how easy it is to let those feelings fill your head and create a sense of truth and reality for you.
With each Instagram picture, snap chat, and Facebook album of another night out together you weren’t included in or another cram session you didn’t receive a memo about -- even after the countless number of times you suggested that you should all meet up to study – your belief that you are not good enough for them becomes stronger and stronger.
These feeling soon start to carry over into all your relationships and all you can see is all the things you are not invited to, all the texts you send that go unresponded, or times you felt awkwardly on the outside and alone at parties.
The cycle of feeling unlikable and finding another experience to reinforce this belief continues. You spiral deeper and deeper and it seems more and more like a reality because these are the only experiences that stick out to you because they confirm everything you believe about yourself. Your feelings quickly cloud your mind from recalling all the times you were invited to stuff, -- maybe not by that exact group though – study sessions you were invited to, and groups that made sure you felt included in the conversation.
All the positive things in your life that contradict your conception that you are unlikable are overlooked and dismissed. It not that you dismiss these relationships on purpose, but just truly believe that there is not one aspect of you that would make you desirable to other people that you fail to see that there are people out there that value you.
So, for all of you that feel you did not make the cut, that you are undesirable and alone in the world, take a minute to think of all the people that you have in your life, all the memories big or small that you have made. Do not let your negative beliefs about yourself dismiss any relationship or experience.
If you think to yourself, you got invited to that study session because they wanted you notes remind yourself its actually because you guys really get along when you talk before class every day. No longer let your negative core beliefs take away from all the positive things about you and all the authentic connections you have made.
Each of us are special in our own way, we all have our tribe out there, do not let the tribe you thought you’d belong to but don’t cause you to overlook the tribe you have been able to form.
