The Place Where I Learned I Was Tolerated
There is a difference between being included and being accepted.
An Art of Drinking Water reflection · 5 minute read
There is a difference between being included and being accepted.
I learned it at work.
I had a seat at the table.
An email address.
A role that looked legitimate on paper.
And still, something was always slightly off.
Conversations paused when I entered the room.
Decisions were made elsewhere.
My ideas were acknowledged—but rarely adopted.
I was present, but not welcomed.
Not belonging at work doesn’t usually come with confrontation.
It arrives as subtle distance.
As being left out of the after-meetings.
As praise that feels performative rather than sincere.
You start asking yourself quiet questions.
Am I imagining this?
Did I miss something?
Am I asking for too much?
The hardest part is that the rules remain unclear.
You’re told to speak up—but not like that.
To bring your whole self—but not the parts that make people uncomfortable.
To be confident—but not confident enough to disrupt the hierarchy.
So you adjust.
You soften your voice.
You limit your opinions.
You learn which parts of yourself to leave at the door.
Belonging becomes conditional.
And conditional belonging is exhausting.
Your body notices before your mind catches up.
The tension before meetings.
The relief when you work alone.
The way your energy returns on days you don’t have to perform acceptance.
I tried to earn my way in.
Worked harder.
Prepared more.
Stayed later.
But belonging doesn’t respond to effort when the barrier isn’t performance.
It responds to culture.
Water taught me something here.
Water doesn’t force itself into spaces that repel it.
It doesn’t argue with a container that won’t hold it.
It moves toward places where it can exist fully.
Eventually, I stopped asking what I needed to change
and started asking what the environment was asking me to surrender.
My voice?
My values?
My sense of ease?
That was the answer.
Leaving wasn’t failure.
It was clarity.
I wasn’t asking for special treatment.
I was asking for respect.
Now, when I enter new spaces, I pay attention differently.
Not just to titles or promises—
but to how difference is treated.
To whether curiosity exists.
To whether belonging feels mutual.
Because work should not require you to become invisible to stay employed.
If you are somewhere you feel tolerated but not accepted, hear this:
You are not too much.
You are not misreading the room.
And you are not wrong for wanting more than survival.
Belonging is not something you audition for.
It is something that either exists—or doesn’t.
And choosing yourself when it doesn’t
is not quitting.
It is water finding a place it can finally settle,
without being pushed to the edges.