No Mayonnaise, Please!

An Essay on Belonging

Photo by Jametlene Reskp

For a time, when I was five or six years old, I pretended to be allergic to mayonnaise.

It did not come from nothing.

At one point a few weeks earlier, I had developed a slight rash after eating a McChicken. Since then, whenever I ordered one again, I specified to the person at the counter—while lifting myself on my toes to be able to see them— that I was allergic to mayo, so they should make sure not to put any on my sandwich.

Looking back, it seems that I have always had a problem with how healthy my body is. I have written before about my anxiety caused by not having broken any bones yet.

I have also never been extremely sick, other than a bout of pneumonia as a child. I suffer from no chronic illnesses, have good, straight, strong teeth, am naturally rather muscular (especially in my lower body), boast a full head of hair, and nothing about my face stands out as out of place.

Paradoxically, perhaps, the resilience of my body has always made me feel a tad isolated. Surrounded by people being markedly affected by viral disease, genetic bad luck, and just their own folly and laziness, I alone stood untouched by the vagaries of cosmic chance. And because I did not share other people’s problems, I had a hard time relating to them.

The allergy pretension, I see now very clearly, was an attempt at belonging.

Presumably because I had seen it in some cartoon, I had gotten it into my head that it was cool to have an allergy. Hence, I took advantage of the little rash that went away after a few days with no treatment and never reappeared, not even after, years later, I began eating mayonnaise again, and whenever someone asked—and I’ll have you know that a few people did ask—I would proclaim with chest-swelling pride that yes, I too had an allergy, that I too was as feeble and vulnerable as the questioner and all the rest of humanity. And it felt good. Boy, did it feel good.

What I’ve just told you is quite weird, I realize that.

And this is exactly my point.

The desire to belong is an integral human need. It no doubt stands as one of those old-as-the-species facets of our survival instinct, a way our reptilian brain makes sure we are not left to fend for ourselves in a wild, unfeeling world.

In fact, according to a paper I read recently¹, the need to belong has been proven to be one of our fundamental behavioral motivations. In other words, being accepted as part of some group is crucial to us, so important, in fact, that failure to meet this need can have severe pathological consequences.

And sometimes, in order to belong, we end up doing some pretty crazy things.

Here are a few more of mine:

1. To fit the mold of the American movie “high school boy”, as a sophomore I joined together with two guys I barely knew and formed a punk rock band called Red Twist (it was to be called Green Twist, but the guy who owned the studio we practiced at thought it’d be too much of a Green Day rip-off—as though substituting green for red could take away the fact that 50% of our repertoire consisted of covers of their songs). As the bass player of that band, I even dyed my hair blonde. I admit that it was loads of fun, but I never quite got over the feeling that I was playing a role, that I was trying—and shamefully failing—to fake it till I made myself into the kind of person for whom partying and getting drunk and dancing on stage felt natural. The fact that I’m sitting in bed drafting this essay instead of practicing guitar against the backdrop of protesting neighbours may serve to show you I never succeeded.

2. In law school, in order to seem to have more life experience than I did, I pretended to be an occasional smoker. For a while, whenever I went out with my mates, I made sure to buy a cigarette off of whoever was loaded that time, just to have it on me, ready for the rest of the night. If the others began to light up, so would I, and I would hold that cigarette until it succumbed to its own combustion, taking just enough occasional, shallow puffs from the death-dealing thing to look like I was helping it along. In fact, there exists a picture, taken at a students’ union party, of me dressed to the nines and looking thoughtfully at a night sky as devoid of stars as a cup of black coffee, all while holding a half-consumed cigarette the way only a neophyte would.

3. Once (and this story still makes me cringe, so consider yourselves lucky I’m telling it to you), when I was in third grade or so, I went with my father to a one-week karate camp on the beach. At that point in my life, I was a thickly-bespectacled nerd and chronically friendless, so I was comically unaware of just how one did make friends. We went there as part of a larger group representing our club, and one night, after the day’s activities were done and beatings dealt and taken, I took the proverbial bull by its black belt and asked the other kids, who were about to collect in one room and hang out, if I could join them. Most were older than me, so that night, I felt I had to prove myself to them, to let these karate kids know that I was tough enough to be amongst them, that I was street and worldly and wise beyond my years. So I began swearing like a sailor. In fact, to hear what filth was spewing out of my mouth that fateful night, I think any sailor worth his salt would have turned lobstery with shame. I was swearing so much that I began to forget all those people’s names and just addressed each one using the previous insult I’d used. I became so unhinged that the group—and I can scarcely blame them—made a secret plan to get rid of me. At one point, faking a stomachache, one of the oldest boys asked everyone to get out of his room. Then, using what I can only assume were the balconies, the others climbed back into that room. I was utterly confused, and made even more so by the cacophony that could soon be heard from beyond the door. Surely, I thought, they couldn’t have…One by one, I started banging on the doors to all their rooms. I hit the wood so hard and so thoroughly that at one point, maybe one or ten or thirty minutes later, the clatter subsided and the guy with the stomachache opened his door, with nothing more than a towel tied at his waist, and pretended everyone had gone to sleep. Judging by the muffled laughter coming from behind him from voices I recognized, I understood that to be a lie, albeit a graceful one. The next morning, I apologised profusely to the few of them who’d still meet my gaze, but it was no use. In trying to act the way I thought would ingratiate me with them, I had alienated the karate kids.

It seems to me that quite often, belonging is nothing more than a role-playing game. In order to fit in, we assume the guise of someone appropriate for the task. We become a rogue, a fitter-in, the kind of person who belongs.

Thus, like many other endeavors we undertake in this circus we call our modern society, belonging becomes a game of pretend.

And we are experts at that game, aren’t we? We’re full-time, professional, award-winning pretenders.

We pretend to be stronger than we are. We pretend to be happier than we are. We pretend not to care about our outward appearance. We pretend not to mind that our best friend of two decades hasn’t called us on our birthday. We pretend to respect the neighbor who throws his trash out the window each weekend morning. We pretend to be happy in an abusive relationship, or that it’s not as bad as it looks. We pretend to like what’s on TV and how Instagram makes us feel. We pretend to know where we’re going and how to get there. We pretend to be serious adults, all while yearning for any opportunity—a funny T-shirt, a drinking game, a Marvel movie—to let the children inside us see the light again.

Just like that, I believe that we pretend to have much more in common than we actually do.

Recently, I read a short novel called Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au. In the book, the unnamed narrator takes her mother on a trip to Japan, outwardly as a gift to the latter but really mostly because the daughter wants the opportunity to be alone with her mother, to engage her in uninterrupted conversation and have a chance to get to know her better.

To her surprise, things prove confusingly difficult. Over the course of a hundred or so pages of plotless narrative, the narrator-character begins to realize how difficult it is to truly know another person, not just because it’s hard to get anyone to talk about themselves or understand the answers they give to your questions, but how hard, in truth, to even formulate any pertinent questions. How do you know what to ask somebody?

What is the limit of our capacity to know one another? This is a question my wife and I have pondered quite a lot over the last few years. If you live with another person for long enough, you expect that you’ll arrive at a certain level of understanding of that person. That they, in effect, will no longer be able to surprise you. But that’s so not the case! We surprise each other all the damn time, in ways mostly good but also, sometimes, bad. So the question has stuck.

And yet, even if there exists such a limit to our understanding of each other’s minds and hearts, the need to belong still exists. We want to be accepted, to be loved, to be validated, to be seen, to the extent that it is possible.

That’s all well and good so far.

The issue is that there are healthy ways to fulfill this need, and there are more destructive ones.

A lot of people, I’m sure, after arriving at the height of human folly in their youth and treating themselves to a look down at their lives from there, eventually sober up and grow to form healthy, lasting relationships with other people. But many don’t. All around me, I see examples of adults stuck in the minds of children², adults who stay in stale, cold relationships because it’s less of a bother than breaking up, adults who strain to purchase automobiles they can’t afford because they believe the rest of us care what brand or model they use to get around the block, adults who drink because it used to be cool and they think it still is, adults who talk dirty because all their buddies do, adults who have children because everybody else is doing it and they don’t want to miss out.³

Adults who betray who they are in favor of who they think other people want them to be.

But if we sacrifice so much of ourselves on the altar of belonging, if we replace our likes and dislikes, our hopes and fears and dreams and uncertainties and talents and passions and styles, with ones which do not and have never belonged to us, then who is the one actually doing the belonging? Is it still us?

Or is it the kind of person who would do the kind of thing we are doing, the kind of person who, by our hypothesis, we are not?

There is a way to do it right, of course. But it means coming to terms with the reality of rejection, of people finding out the real you, and some of them potentially giving you the boot. The process of belonging is, in many ways, the natural continuation of the process of self-discovery. Only by looking at ourselves not through a glass darkly, but with honesty and openness and courage, can we discover who we really are, or as much of that as we are able to piece together at any one time, and only once we’ve done that should we begin to contemplate searching for people of our ilk.

Unless we approach this process honestly and without shame, we might live our lives surrounded by people, some of whom we may even consider friends and family, but we will still feel empty, our need to belong severely unfulfilled.

This is not an advice column, but let me tell you how it’s been for me. Every time I tried to fit in by changing something about myself or adopting something new (a phrase, a whole speech pattern, an article of clothing, a certain behavior or activity I’d never tried before because I instinctively knew it wouldn’t be a good fit and it always turned out that it really wasn’t), no matter the result, I did not feel good. Among people who were genuinely like that, I was out of place, a tortoise in the sea.

Instead, all the true friendships I’ve made, all my achievements in activities I’ve stuck with for years, have been the result of self-honesty. No, I never made friends with the cool people (the tough guys, the bullies, the popular kings and queens). No, I never became a professonal athlete or received a black belt. And no, I never stopped eating mayonnaise—though it turns out I don’t even like it.

But I did learn who the actual cool people were (the down-to-earths, the readers, the wide-awake-dreamers, those for whom popularity is an alien concept). I did learn how to listen to my body and let it instead of my dictatorial mind show me what it needs. And I did embrace my nerdiness, my love of comics and video games, and my flat feet.

In truth, I don’t have many friends. I don’t belong to any secret clubs or openly secret societies. I’m not a popular, in vogue writer or really anything else. I don’t smoke, seldom drink, and I don’t gamble or drive a powerful car. I’m just a late-twenties writer with a wife, two cats, and a dozen or so people I hold very dear.

Some might call me boring.

But I feel like I fit in.

Where?

In the only place that matters.

My own life.

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1. The Need To Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Human Attachments as Fundamental Human Motivation by Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, in Psychological Bulletin, May 1995.

2. As noted before, it’s healthy and necessary to feed our inner children. This kind of behavior isn’t that.

3. Not to mention the many much more horrible things people have done in the name of belongingness. Like, for example, sinking into incel culture and the Manosphere. For more on this subject, listen to the wonderful podcast Boys Like Me from CBC.