I Don't Belong Here

I Don't Belong Here

*In which our heroine discovers that belonging is rather like finding a good parking spot—everyone thinks they know where it should be, but nobody's quite sure what to do when they actually find one.*

Maple Syrup Henderson* had always suspected that the universe had made some sort of clerical error when it came to her existence. Not the dramatic kind of error that resulted in natural disasters or reality TV shows, but the more subtle variety—like when someone orders a cheeseburger and receives a fish sandwich, and everyone pretends it's perfectly normal while the customer sits there wondering if they've somehow forgotten what beef looks like.

*Not her real name, obviously. Her real name was Margaret, but she'd been called Maple Syrup since the unfortunate incident at the Pancake Paradise when she was seven and had explained in great detail to the waitress exactly why the syrup was not, technically speaking, maple syrup at all, but rather high-fructose corn syrup with artificial flavoring and brown dye. The nickname had stuck with the peculiar persistence of gum on a hot sidewalk.

Standing in the lobby of Henderson & Associates Insurance (no relation, despite sharing a name that had caused seventeen years of paperwork confusion), Maple adjusted her sensory-friendly cardigan for the fourteenth time that morning. The cardigan was gray, not because she particularly liked gray, but because it was the exact color of invisibility. Or at least, it should have been.

"Maple Syrup!" bellowed Bob Kowalski, her supervisor, with the enthusiasm of a man who had discovered that shouting somehow made insurance claims process faster. "Conference room! Now! Big presentation!"

Maple winced. Not at the volume—she'd grown quite fond of Bob's predictable decibel levels—but at the phrase "big presentation." In her experience, big presentations were rather like root canals: necessary, occasionally beneficial, but guaranteed to leave everyone involved feeling slightly traumatized.

The conference room smelled of burnt coffee, industrial carpet, and the particular brand of desperation that came from trying to sell flood insurance to people who lived on hills. Maple took her usual seat in the back corner, where she could observe the fascinating social dynamics of her colleagues without being expected to participate in what she privately called "the dance of unnecessary eye contact."

"Alright, folks," Bob announced, wrestling with a PowerPoint that clearly had opinions about being displayed, "we've got a special presentation today from the Regional Efficiency Expert!"

The Regional Efficiency Expert turned out to be a woman in a severe black suit who looked like she had been manufactured specifically for the purpose of making other people feel inadequate. She had the kind of smile that suggested she knew exactly how much you were worth on the open market and was disappointed by the figure.

"I'm here," she announced, "to identify inefficiencies in your workflow and eliminate... redundancies."

Maple's brain, which had a tendency to translate corporate speak into plain English, immediately heard: "I'm here to figure out who to fire."

For the next forty-seven minutes (Maple timed everything—it helped her navigate the bewildering world of social interaction), the Regional Efficiency Expert outlined various strategies for "maximizing human resources" and "streamlining interpersonal protocols." Maple found herself wondering if the woman had ever actually met a human being, or if she'd learned about them entirely from business textbooks written by aliens.

During the break, Maple retreated to her desk, where she kept a small collection of interesting pens and a stress ball shaped like Earth. She was reorganizing her paperclips by size (a perfectly reasonable activity that helped her think) when she overheard Jenny from Accounting speaking to Mike from Claims.

"She's so weird," Jenny was saying, and Maple's excellent hearing—both a blessing and a curse in an open office environment—picked up every word. "Always sitting by herself, never talks to anyone. And what's with all that... twitching?"

"Stimming," Mike corrected absently. "My nephew does it. It's an autism thing."

"Oh." Jenny's voice carried the particular tone of someone who had just been handed information they weren't entirely sure what to do with. "Well, she still doesn't really fit in here, does she? I mean, she's nice enough, but..."

Maple's hands stilled on her paperclips. There it was again—that familiar sensation of being a square peg in a world full of round holes, except someone had convinced all the round holes that being square was a design flaw rather than simply a different way of existing.

She'd felt it in high school, where her detailed knowledge of insurance law (admittedly an unusual hobby for a teenager) had made her about as popular as a tax audit. She'd felt it in college, where her habit of reading textbooks for fun had marked her as irredeemably odd. And she felt it here, where her ability to spot patterns in data and catch errors that everyone else missed should have made her valuable, but somehow only seemed to make her... different.

The problem, Maple reflected as she returned to the conference room, was that she'd spent so much time trying to figure out how to belong that she'd never stopped to wonder whether the places she was trying to belong were actually worth belonging to.

The Regional Efficiency Expert was back, armed with charts and graphs that looked like they'd been designed by someone who thought emotions were a form of market inefficiency.

"Now," she said, clicking to a slide titled "Identifying Non-Essential Personnel," "we need to look at employees who don't contribute to team cohesion and workplace harmony."

Maple felt a familiar sinking sensation, like discovering that the elevator you'd been waiting for was actually going down.

"For instance," the Expert continued, "employees who don't participate in social activities, who have... unusual work habits, or who simply don't mesh well with company culture."

It was at this moment that Maple experienced what could only be described as a revelation. Not the religious kind—those tended to involve bright lights and mysterious voices—but the more practical variety, like suddenly understanding why your car has been making that weird noise for three months.

The revelation was this: they were all completely, utterly, spectacularly wrong.

Not wrong in the way that people are wrong about whether pineapple belongs on pizza (it doesn't, but Maple was willing to tolerate disagreement on this point). Wrong in the fundamental way that people are wrong when they insist that north is whichever direction they happen to be facing.

Maple stood up. This was unusual enough that the entire room fell silent, as if someone had just announced that gravity was taking a lunch break.

"Excuse me," she said, and her voice carried the particular clarity that comes from suddenly understanding something that had been puzzling you for years. "But I think there's been a mistake."

The Regional Efficiency Expert looked at her with the expression of someone who had found a typo in a document they'd already submitted to their boss. "I'm sorry?"

"You're looking for people who don't fit in," Maple continued, feeling remarkably calm for someone who was almost certainly about to be fired. "People who don't contribute to 'team cohesion' and 'workplace harmony.' But you're measuring the wrong things."

She walked to the front of the room, past her colleagues who were staring at her with the fascination typically reserved for traffic accidents and reality TV.

"You want to know about efficiency?" Maple asked, and there was something in her voice that hadn't been there before—a confidence that came from finally understanding the rules of a game she'd been playing wrong her entire life. "In the past six months, I've caught forty-three errors in claim processing that would have cost the company approximately $847,000. I've identified patterns in fraudulent claims that our previous system missed entirely. And I've streamlined our filing process to reduce processing time by thirty-seven percent."

The room was very quiet. Even the ancient air conditioning system seemed to be holding its breath.

"But apparently," Maple continued, "that doesn't matter because I don't laugh at jokes I don't find funny, I don't pretend to be interested in conversations about television shows I've never watched, and I organize my workspace in a way that makes sense to me rather than conforming to some arbitrary standard of what a desk should look like."

She turned to face the Regional Efficiency Expert, who was looking distinctly uncomfortable, as if she'd suddenly realized she was in the wrong meeting.

"The thing is," Maple said, "I don't actually want to fit in with people who think fitting in is more important than doing good work. I don't want to belong to a group that values conformity over competence, or social performance over actual results."

Bob Kowalski, who had been silent throughout this exchange, suddenly cleared his throat. "Maple Syrup," he said, and his voice was oddly gentle, "are you saying you... don't want to be here?"

Maple considered this question with the careful attention she gave to all important matters. "No," she said finally. "I'm saying that I *do* belong here, but not in the way everyone thinks I should. I belong here because I'm good at what I do. I belong here because I care about getting things right. I belong here because when everyone else is focused on looking like they're working, I'm actually working."

She looked around the room at her colleagues—really looked at them, perhaps for the first time.

"The question isn't whether I belong," she said. "The question is whether you want to belong to a place that's more interested in appearances than results."

Jenny from Accounting was staring at her with an expression of dawning understanding. Mike from Claims was nodding slowly. Even Bob looked like he was reconsidering some fundamental assumptions about the nature of insurance work.

The Regional Efficiency Expert, meanwhile, was furiously scribbling notes and looking increasingly like someone who had come to perform surgery and discovered that the patient was actually healthier than the doctors.

"I see," she said carefully. "And how do you suggest we... measure workplace efficiency?"

Maple smiled. It was not a particularly large smile, but it contained within it all the satisfaction of someone who had just realized they'd been reading the map upside down for years.

"Well," she said, "you could start by measuring the things that actually matter."

---

*Three months later, Henderson & Associates Insurance had become the most profitable branch in the regional network. This was partly due to Maple's new role as Senior Data Analysis Specialist, and partly due to the fact that everyone else had finally stopped wasting time pretending to be someone they weren't.*

*The Regional Efficiency Expert had been transferred to a different division, where she was reportedly learning to measure efficiency by results rather than conformity. Bob Kowalski had discovered that he was much better at his job when he stopped worrying about whether his employees fit some predetermined mold and started focusing on whether they were good at what they did.*

*And Maple Syrup Henderson had learned the most important lesson of all: that belonging isn't about becoming someone else. It's about finding the courage to be exactly who you are, and insisting that the world make room for that person.*

*She still organized her paperclips by size, still timed meetings, and still found most small talk to be roughly as appealing as dental work. But now she did these things with the confidence of someone who had discovered that being different wasn't a bug—it was a feature.*

*The universe, it turned out, hadn't made a mistake after all. It had simply been waiting for everyone else to catch up.*

Here Endeth This Story.

**Author's Note:** *This story contains no actual maple syrup, despite what the title character's nickname might suggest. It does, however, contain liberal amounts of self-acceptance, a moderate helping of workplace comedy, and just a touch of the sort of wisdom that comes from finally understanding that the problem was never you—it was everyone else's expectations.