Come as you are (but please…don’t): the belonging / uniqueness trap
“Be yourself”: we find the words written in sparkly letters and cute fonts over t-shirts and sweaters, embroidered on those fuzzy, comfy socks your aunt gave you for Christmas, on mugs and bags and notebooks. We wear the statement, we carry it around and it feels light, like that. It feels like an easy thing to do.
What the glittery words don’t tell you (and thank God or that would be a very hard-to read t-shirt) is that it takes courage to be yourself, to feel true to your values, your ideas, likes and dislikes. Most of the time, in fact, you will feel like you can’t actually do that, you will feel the need to conform, to fit in somewhere; you will be at a party somewhere, a drink in your hand, your eyes wandering in the room while everyone is laughing in groups and feel different and… wrong? And maybe one night you will feel your heart beat louder than the music at the party while you walk up to one of the groups and you will start to talk and perhaps laugh.
We, as humans, crave that: the approval, the validation, the feeling that you are part of something bigger. Just think about Harry Potter’s houses, Percy Jackson’s Godly parentage and the number of quizzes we have done over the years to know and be sure of which one was most like us. When we do fit in a group, we feel secure, safe, comfortable. I am a Gryffindor! And you are too! And that means it’s safe to be one, we get to be one. And you will finally feel like you belong.
We, as humans, crave that: the approval, the validation, the feeling that you are part of something bigger.
Belonging comes with a price, though, and that’s uniqueness: the desire to belong, to form and maintain meaningful relationships as a basic human need causes individuals to strive so much for such a sense, that the differentiation element, the thing that renders you you, is sacrificed for the group identification. As the “optimal distinctiveness theory” posits, this eternal tension (between belonging and feeling authentical to yourself) has 4 facets:
When the belongingness and the uniqueness levels are too low, we have exclusion: we don’t feel valued nor accepted, we are excluded from the context and simply feel like we don’t belong there.
When both are high, we have inclusion: we are each other missing pieces, we fit and feel valued and appreciated. This is the “optimal point” the theory talks about, the sweet spot where a group of people makes us feel valid and seen and somehow at the same time provides a sense of “we”.
Pretty simple, right? But what happens when the two levels are not perfectly synchronized? What if one of the two levels is higher than the other?
Well, when uniqueness is higher than the belonging level, we have a very tricky situation that makes up for the term differentiation: you are part of something, but… it doesn’t feel right. You don’t exactly match, you feel like a guest in what is supposed to be your own house and so you will always feel like the “weird one”, kind of isolated and stigmatized even when in a group.
When the belongingness and the uniqueness levels are too low, we have exclusion: we don’t feel valued nor accepted, we are excluded from the context and simply feel like we don’t belong there.
And, lastly, assimilation: when the other is true, when the belonging level becomes higher than the uniqueness, you will feel like a piece of a puzzle that just won’t go. A kid will pick you up and say “I don’t know where this piece goes! It doesn’t fit”. And so you will wander a little bit and try to find a puzzle that works best, one that does fit (and you will find that eventually). Or… (and that’s our case) in order to fit in that group, you will mold, and change shape, act like you are painted just like the missing piece the kid was looking for, but you painted all over yourself and… Hey! Weren’t you blue? Time ago? Why do you look like that now? Our identities being slowly swallowed, we assimilate, adapt, homogenize and conform until we become a shell – our true selves long gone, the imagined one taking place. You are at the party now, and you are the one making the jokes and everyone is laughing and having fun, except you. You have traded yourself for someone else, something else and your fear of being alone succeeded into making you someone else. What you will unfortunately discover is that the more you try to not be a stranger to people, the more you try to blend in and match other people’s energies, the more you will be a stranger to yourself. This is exactly when the brave, dreamy, uplifting “you can be anything you want to be” message from the first Zootopia movie meets the “but what if I want to be exactly like my (toxic) pack?” of the second movie.
Our identities being slowly swallowed, we assimilate, adapt, homogenize and conform until we become a shell – our true selves long gone, the imagined one taking place.
If the first movie dealt with the uniqueness trope and reminded us to be brave enough to try to be whatever our hearts desired to be, the second one dealt with the belonging trap, with the pain of choices, with the fear that comes with being true to ourselves, with what happens when you don’t.
We see it especially towards the end of the movie, when Judy says “You can be different! You don’t have to be like your family” to Pawbert.
And it had to be Judy! Because Judy believes in people, because Judy knows that it’s possible to choose your path, to be whatever you want to be and she proved us that over and over again: with her becoming the police officer she always dreamed to be, even when others thought she didn’t fit and later on, when her words, her optimism, her courage worked on Nick! Nick! We are talking about the master of assimilation here: the fox that had been bullied as a kid, that had been prejudicially called “shifty” and “untrustworthy”, that had felt like he could never be anything else, anything more than that and so he had chosen to be exactly what does words were painting him as. But even after having felt exclusion on his fur for a great deal of his life, Nick’s arc is proof that inclusion does work: Judy chose to believe in him, to trust him and that finally gave him the courage to be his true-self. And even now, lying on the floor after being stabbed, Judy attempts to believe in Pawbert just as she had done with Nick. Even when discovering the malice in Pawbert, what Judy sees is the pain from which Pawbert acts are stemming from, the hope for something better “You can be different! You can choose! You can be anything you want to be” Judy says, not out of some savior complex or naivety, but because she has lived her whole life knowing and proving that that’s possible, because she has seen Nick build a life for himself that was not grounded in rejection and masking anymore. She is not trying to fix Pawbert, she is showing him a path he hadn’t considered until then. But Pawbert doesn’t want to ever feel what Nick felt as a kid, and so he chooses wrong: “I don’t want to be different” he replies, indeed. What if I want to fit and be exactly like my family? Pawbert chooses to mold, to become the villain and earn a seat at the family table someday, to make his family proud, to feel finally seen by them. He chooses to be the villain out of fear and anger, just to never feel lonely and out of place again. And so while Nick stops being just any other stereotypical fox to become himself, Pawbert refuses to discover what makes him himself, and chooses to be “a Lynxley” instead.
What if I want to fit and be exactly like my family? Pawbert chooses to mold, to become the villain and earn a seat at the family table someday, to make his family proud, to feel finally seen by them.
The problem with that, with sacrificing yourself for the group is multiple, of course. But one seems more important to talk about now: what about the puzzles in which you do perfectly fit… what about that missing piece, then? I swear, that blue you are is exactly the missing piece of the sky, of the sea that another puzzle needs. Don’t paint all over yourself trying to be a little cloud when you could be the whole sky if you just kept being yourself and grew into that. If you feel like you don’t belong, you are always going to long for something else, something different. If that’s the case, it takes a good amount of courage to be yourself, to recognize that yea, y’know what? Maybe you don’t exactly fit in (off-screen voice that says I don’t fit in and I don’t wanna fit in) here and that’s okay! You will find your people and you will find yourself, just as Nick did.
(And if you did, or when you eventually do, when you feel like you are actually part of the group that is genuinely laughing at some party, don’t forget how the “before” felt like: if you see someone left-out, excluded, shyly sticking to a corner of the room, give them a smile, perhaps a compliment. You don’t have to save everyone and you are not responsible for changing the ones who chose the wrong pack, but by simply acknowledging them, you can make the ones still searching feel like they finally belong somewhere)
In synthesis, live your truth! (or become a villain, but please… don’t)
