Where Do I Fit In?

I’m building a life from a place I didn’t think I’d be. On feeling like an outsider during my 30s.

‘I want to be with someone who doesn’t say, “We’re not in a Disney movie,” when I ask why he won’t say he loves me.’

I’m at a pub near my parents’ house in North London and laughing through my tears. It feels good after years of quietly hoping for change to say these words. I want commitment, love and safety and I know he can’t give it to me. The man who would hesitate before introducing me as his girlfriend weakly replies, ‘Are you sure?’ 

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ and I laugh some more. 

‘See,’ he says. ‘We’re even laughing as we break up. We’re good together.’ 

I laugh some more because I am free. 

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Three weeks before this meeting in the pub, I caught him cheating on dating apps. I was due to fly to New Zealand for a friend’s wedding days later and I spent those weeks in shock in some of the most beautiful and quiet pockets of the world. I’d only agreed to meet my ex when I returned because I needed him to text our landlord to say he was coming off the lease so the flat we once shared could be mine. He wouldn’t do that unless we met. Considering how insistent he was for this meeting, he was woefully unprepared. He had more passion when discussing what to have for dinner. 

‘You aren’t making a compelling case,’ I told him. ‘You have no conviction.’ 

English isn’t his first language and he asked what ‘conviction’ meant. 

During our relationship, I was the bad guy for coming home drunk and shouting at him, ‘WHY WONT YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME?’

‘I’ll try again in six months,’ he said at the pub that day. 

He texted the landlord that evening. When he finally moved out and I could move back in, he followed up with an email confirming he’ll follow up with me again in six months to see if we could get back together. He only signed a six-month contract at his new place. 

Six months later, I didn’t hear from him. Instead, I saw him holding hands with a woman with nice hair on Mare Street. 

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All parts of him still haunt me. The night I caught him cheating on dating apps was sudden and traumatising - I just happened to see the flash of purple of the dating app out of the corner of my eye. My life had been ripped from underneath me. A break-up is like a death and all that I know about grief came into play. I’ve had a partner suddenly die, yet he loved me - and the last thing he did before taking his life was text me to tell me so. He is far more deserving of my grief.

It’s troubling when you’re grieving for a total moron, who isn’t dead and is very much in my neighbourhood of Hackney. The bitterness still lingers in my mouth that my ex hasn’t suffered as I have. Being in a relationship with someone who says, ‘I always had one foot out the door,’ is horrifying for your self-esteem. Our worst fear, that we may not be good enough or worthy of love is realised. 

And yet, I win. I win because I may be carrying the scars, but I’ve emerged from those wounds stronger and wiser. I am free of him and his issues and he’s not. He’d cheated with his ex before me and he’ll likely do it again.

Today, he’s with someone else, holding a version of our story where he’s not the bad guy. He said our break-up was my fault because I wouldn’t give him another chance. ‘How could you do this to us?’ he’d say. His ability to rewrite the narrative was impressive. 

This man that I hate was someone I was prepared to become the father of my child. Before I caught him cheating, it was something I wanted so badly for us. Our relationship was built on a shaky foundation, but it still was a foundation of sorts. We shared a home and talked about having a family. We were building our little imperfect world and I was happy about it. When our relationship ended, I lost a sense of belonging and place. 

Now, I’m building a life from a place I didn’t think I’d be. 

I was very upset at turning 35 this year, whereas I was delighted when I turned 34 the year before. At 34, I felt on the right path and at 35, I’ve reached the middle of a decade that is riddled with transition and I’m not even close to where I want to be. This has been a decade of my life when shit got real.

I was ripped from my twenties abruptly and woke up to the reality of the adult world and I need to shape up to be part of it. Except I don’t even know what it means to be an adult beyond reaching the milestones expected of a woman in her thirties. There are markers of success that everyone can see and are understood through generations: marriage, kids, property ownership, a profession. When it comes to these markers and in comparison, to others, I fail the adult test. 

Where do I fit in? 

Delia Ephron writes in Sister, Mother, Husband, Dog (etc.):

‘In your twenties you know, even if you don’t admit this either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life.’

This is true, and in your thirties, you know that you’re running out of time to waste. I’m grieving a lost youth as everything and everyone changes around me. I’m feeling left behind. 

What felt like overnight, people who played the game of life like tortoises, slow and steady, won the race. They had marriages, financial stability, and successful careers and I’m renting, hustling, scraping by and endlessly having tiresome conversations with men on dating apps. My life can feel exhausting and rather pointless at the same time. 

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There is talk of the loneliness of the thirties. Friendships change, people move away or have children and are less available to simply hang out. These changes are inconvenient at best, or on a bad day, can lead us to a crisis about the insignificance status of our lives. Other people have responsibilities, dependents, and a life that seems to matter more than mine. I sometimes wonder how long it would take for someone to notice if I went missing. 

My life looks different in every way to many around me and it’s unsettling when some can’t empathise with your reality. We need people who match our lives on paper, such as single friends, mum friends, career friends, and people whose parents haven’t bought them property and we also need connections who share our worldview and have the time to talk to us about it. We crave feeling seen and it’s when we feel truly seen that we feel settled and part of a community and tribe. 

I’m perfectly happy existing as a single person in the day-to-day. Men are annoying. They walk through the flat to take their coat off and hang it over a chair in the living room rather than on the coat hooks by the front door. They empty their pockets over your books and shroud the place in darkness on weekends to watch motorsports. Or they complain when you want to buy things as though simply being male means they can assume the role of ‘sensible accountant’ in the household. Well, this was my ex anyway. 

However, with the freedom of singledom, I can also feel very alone. I can do what I want because no one cares what I do. I’m buying more clothes and overpriced groceries than when I was in a relationship. I’m shopping to comfort myself as a feeble replacement for human touch. I want to spend money on looking as good as possible because there’s no one knocking around my flat (or anywhere else) that fancies me. I miss the physicality of being in a relationship - the hugs, the spooning, the sex, more than anything. Now, I’m living in a peaceful, but isolated bubble of just me. 

I feel like an outsider looking in as everyone else gets on with their lives and I feel trapped between the youth of my twenties and the intensity of my thirties. I experience the weight of the responsibility of this era, without the achievement of it. This feeling of being an outsider looking in feels familiar. Throughout my life, I’ve always felt like the guest at the party, welcomed, but knowing I’ve gained access via invitation from someone more true of the party’s tribe. 

I’ve got three passports: one from a country I can’t speak the language of, one I have no idea where any of its counties are on a map and the other is England, which is where I live and should feel most at home. But I just don’t.

I find English people too reserved and they find me too direct. People always ask me where I’m from, which I don’t mind as I’m happy to not be from here and I was reminded of my difference when the Queen died and I didn’t join the nation in an outpouring of grief. I sit in this awkward space of otherness and sameness and feel often judged or assumed upon based on my voice, my appearance, whatever it may be and that is what it is to not be seen. Perhaps that explains the attention-seeking career path I’ve chosen: writers crave to be seen and understood. If you delve into a writer’s past, likely they were deprived of those two things. 

I have few memories of my Irish grandfather, aside from him once saying that my sister and I were ‘a bit dark’ and me thinking his farmhouse in Ballymahon was too cold. We were likely dark from our holidays with our other grandparents in Cyprus. Our Cypriot grandparents didn’t speak the same language as us, but showered us with love by feeding us marble cake for breakfast and bringing cardigans out for us on a 25° Celsius (77° Fahrenheit) evening, just in case we got cold. 

Maybe the Irish have too many children and grandchildren to feel compelled to be nice to them, or maybe it’s just my family. I don’t know enough about either culture to be able to truly say. I’d get away with it most likely, but it’d be dishonest for me to tell stories set in either of my heritage lands. 

The problem with mixed heritage is what story can I tell? I feel more connected to Cyprus because it’s better for holidays and I look more like them than I do Irish. Although, in winter I am very pale and have Irish colouring and then for summer I change to olive tones and have to buy a second foundation. My skin both burns and tans easily in the sun. It took me most my life to accept this fact and take wearing suncream more seriously. Likely this denial of my true paleness and therefore my Irishness has done long-lasting damage to my skin. But while I’ve always felt more Cypriot, when I meet Cypriots from Cyprus, we’re not the same at all. Or even if I meet fully Cypriot second-generation immigrants, we have little in common either.  

Where are the mixed heritage characters in storytelling and popular culture? I don’t even know what it is to tell the story of two cultures in one place. What is there to say about being mixed heritage rather than it’s a confusing experience of being like an insider and outsider at once? How would I bring it to life through narrative detail? We spoke English at home, ate Marks & Spencer’s food and my dad would watch TV with subtitles on. Is any of this interesting? A novel about a girl who didn’t wear sunscreen when she should is hardly compelling. 

As the fertility clock ticks down on me and I face the fact that I may not have a family, or at least not in the way I’d envisioned, I often ask why having a family is so important to me. I realise it’s the foundation I felt I was building with my ex. Perhaps through creating a family, I’d have a place to work it all out with people who weren’t just me. I could live in a home that’s a cultural blend and have a wedding with traditions from all my places.

When I was with my Italian partner, the Mediterranean culture already dominated in our home, primarily through food, and he insisted our kids would have to learn Italian. Perhaps my kids would show the Irish side by having that revolutionary spirit or talking too much or they’d be writers. My love of words and the political and opinionated side of me comes from my Irish ancestors. I’m descended from writers, politicians and revolutionaries who were big names on the small island. 

My nephews are Irish, American, Jewish and Cypriot. When we ask the five-year-old if he prefers Greece or Cyprus, he replies Cyprus without hesitation and we burst with pride. They are very nice to kids there and the weather is far more reliable because it’s quite far away from Greece if you look on a map. Meanwhile, I go on dates and men think Cyprus is one of the Greek islands. 

It’s not. 

The thirties is an era where you navigate the realities of adult life. There’s a grief you move through as you age. Grief is a topic I keep coming back to. Then there’s ambiguous grief - we feel far more sympathy for those who are struggling with fertility in a relationship than those who struggle with ‘social infertility’ because they don’t have a partner. We need to be more respectful for the sadness of when there’s a gap between where you are and where you want to be. People say: 

Just freeze your eggs! 

You can have a baby alone! 

The only reassurance I want is someone to say ‘you’ll meet someone’, for people to connect with the desire of what I want. 

I don’t want to do it alone. I’m tired of doing my own life alone. Aloneness dominates my daily life. I’m single, self-employed and live alone. People assume I have a Sex and the City style social life and glamorous fun dates. Sure, my body hasn’t been ripped apart by a baby’s head coming out of it and my eye bags aren’t dark from sleepless nights, and if a date goes well, I feel on top of the world. However, my reality is I live in fear that I won’t. Fear that I won’t get the life I want, fear that my mistakes mean I’ve missed my chance. Of course, there’s always time to catch up on pension payments or make more of an effort with one’s work and yes, meet someone. But many people have dreams unrealised and are facing responsibilities or sacrifices that are more serious now than when we were younger.

In our twenties, we move as one and in our thirties, we part ways. It doesn’t feel good when we crave community, when we crave likeness and the safety of our tribe and it’s not there. When we feel left behind, we’re like outsiders looking in. Although, those we assume are insiders are likely feeling it, too. 

Other people’s lives are a confrontation with the pain of unmet desires. My published book to some may be what their baby is to me. However, this isn’t as simple as a comparison: I want what she has, she wants what I have. I don’t particularly mind that people have a big house or a proper job. I’m not convinced that following the conventional blueprint leads you to a superior life experience. However, it would be nice to feel less like you’re looking through the window. 

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Our pains can be our gifts. What is life or any story without tension? Our dual perspectives and our perceived weakness for what we lack can be our superpower. My ear is very well trained to foreign accents, which serves me well as I work internationally. It’s people who can’t understand different accents who I cringe at now, not my family for having them. I think how sheltered, how English their world must be. 

Immigrant parents aren’t just people from a place, they’re people who left that place. While I may envy those who come from one culture, I know there’s an oppression that can come with that. Do I wish I grew up in Palmer’s Green and married a Greek Cypriot boy from there? Not particularly. Perhaps there’s freedom in designing your own way of being. Maybe my family created its own culture like I wanted to do with my future one. 

My parents sent me to Greek school on the weekends, perhaps as an attempt for me to have a cultural identity, although it sounds like it was very cheap childcare. We went to the Catholic church as kids, too. I stopped going to both of these places as a teenager without any drama or fanfare. I guess what my parents gave me was choice - choices that they didn't necessarily have.

As Sheena Patel wrote in her book I’m A Fan:

‘We second-generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home…’  

Our obsession with immigration still runs deep in this country. I’ve never forgotten when former prime minister, Theresa May, said in a Brexit speech that ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’ I can’t let it go. It struck a chord as it’s both my insecurity and my gift. 

I glide proudly with my EU passport off a flight and cook batches of Mediterranean food, and love Adele, Louis Theroux, The Thick of It, The Libertines and Harry Potter. However, sometimes I feel like I belong nowhere and that hurts. As the racists, encouraged out by our now former incompetent home secretary chanted the other weekend, ‘Go home’, I wondered where that would be? 

Rule Britannia is still so proudly played. An insight into the psyche that celebrates dominance over others. 

Singing Rule Britannia,

Britannia rules the waves

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves...

Do those patriots not understand the history of this country? Immigrants and their children are residues of the gunpowder of the empire. What I love least about this country has led to what I love most: it’s a land that people have come to from all over the world. The multiculturalism of London and the city I’m in gives it vibrance, and it’s that that gives me pride. 

I know when I write something it truly hits the soul as the views are high and I receive messages from people privately and it’s not shared on social media. When I wrote about feeling displaced after the Queen’s death, I heard from so many people who said they felt the same. Never have I felt more connected and more proud to be part of ‘the outsider’. 

You don’t necessarily have to have parents with foreign accents to feel like you don’t fit in. Many people in my orbit are like me. It can be anything from sexuality, a difference of opinion to the cultural norm, lifestyle, not wanting kids, or an unconventional working life that makes you feel like you’re doing things differently from the blueprint and that you, too, are an outsider looking in. The ‘outsider’ is not an exclusive club.

This is the year that I’ve been cracked open and I’m yet to be put back together again. Since that day in the pub with my ex, I’ve had to detach from the expectations I had for this era of my life. I’ve felt adrift and lost but perhaps I’m finding my place now - in finding belonging with others who feel the same. In accepting that the outsiders can gather and connect through their fear of disconnection. What does it mean to belong? I see it as the belief that I’m here, exactly where I’m supposed to and I deserve to be in this place. 

Does anyone move through this period of life believing they got this? That sounds terribly boring to me. And as for the love I seek of Disney movies? That’s a desire I’m not giving up on. 

With love, 

Tiff xx

How about you? Can you sometimes feel like an outsider looking in? Let me know in the comments.