It doesn’t matter where I turn up, I can never suppress my own particular brand of weirdness. Friends have described me as a maverick, and I will admit I’m unique – or whatever other label you might choose to describe being different from the herd.
In a majority white environment, it might be my brown skin and my mixed Indian-Kenyan-British heritage that sets me apart; in male-dominated spaces, it’s being a woman that marks me out. Elsewhere it’s my education, my west London twang or even my Jain faith.
Everyone has that intersectionality that makes them who they are, but it has taken me a long time to accept that you don’t have to try to belong. I’ve learned that sometimes I will just never fit in no matter what I do, and it’s better to conserve my energy – rather than exhaust myself – and use it elsewhere.
As I’ve got older, and perhaps less naive, I’ve come to appreciate how hard my family tried to protect me from the hostility they encountered as twice migrants – part of the wave of Indian immigrants who followed the Commonwealth path from India to east African countries such as Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and then again onwards to the UK. My dad still has the scar where a racist skinhead punched him when he first arrived here – I didn’t know that was how he had got it for years.
My family instilled in me the idea that I could be anything I put my mind to if I worked hard. They wanted me to feel that I belonged. I think we all believed that once the initial door was open, the structures that perpetuate systemic inequality would also be smashed. But in my experience, that hasn’t been the case.
As a confident teenager, I managed to score an Oxbridge place by impressing the interviewers. I thought I had made it, and that this would be my way of climbing up that social mobility ladder. But in reality, it was my first experience of understanding the need to code-switch if you want to seem to belong. To change the way you speak, to pretend you’ve had the same access to opportunities as your white, middle-class peers and know what they are talking about.
I learned how to talk in a posh way, but I still didn’t fit in and I’d cry every night to my mum, saying I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I quickly came to realise that I didn’t have the same cultural references; perhaps things would have felt fairer if others were told to read the Bhagavad Gita when I was told I didn’t have enough knowledge of the Bible, and was given a week to catch up. I remember a student telling me they didn’t view me as Indian but “tanned”, and I didn’t know back then how to respond to that sort of casual micro-aggression. It would take me years to even learn what a micro-aggression was.
I would overhear my peers talking about me behind my back, commenting on my dark arm hair and the scent of the Gujarati comfort foods that made me feel connected to home. Back then, realising that I would never fit in just made me miserable. The irony was that even within the Indian community, my inability to fit in over the years has led to accusations of being a “coconut” – brown on the outside, white on the inside.
Initially, journalism felt full of opportunity to integrate and find my community, and I was convinced my hard work and creative storytelling would be a recipe for success. But I began to hit glass ceilings. I would see colleagues who seemed to understand the rules of play get ahead. I’d keep thinking that one day I would fit in, be rewarded, be promoted.
But eventually, after a last-straw moment where my grasp of my native tongue of English, even with that Oxbridge education, was called into question, I realised I would never belong in the way I wanted to. And so I quit my career, in the middle of the pandemic, to pursue freelancing. It was a risk but it was also, finally, an opportunity to position myself in spaces that would want someone like me – someone who doesn’t fit the mould and who brings a unique perspective.
Relinquishing the desire to belong has helped rid me of the fear of turning up in spaces where before I might have felt lonely or been considered a loser. I’m more likely to try out new things – taking improv classes, creating a podcast from scratch and attending events that interest me, on topics such as technological hacks to reduce human-wildlife conflict and tackling antimicrobial resistance.
Recently, I caught up with an old friend who said she had always seen me as someone on the “periphery of belonging”. My younger self would have been mortified, but her words helped me to embrace the idea that I belong everywhere and nowhere all at once. And that means the world to me.
Dhruti Shah is an award-winning writer and the host of the Have You Thought About podcast. She is also the author of Bear Markets and Beyond: A bestiary of business terms
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