Have You Become The Square Peg?
Sometimes nothing is particularly wrong with the life you're living. It just doesn't quite fit the person you've become.
I’ve spent a surprising amount of my life trying to make things fit.
Relationships. Friendships. Jobs. Expectations. Rooms full of people where everyone seemed perfectly comfortable while I quietly wondered whether I’d missed an instruction manual on the way in.
For years, I thought being good at life meant being adaptable.
And I am adaptable.
Give me a problem and I'll find a way around it. Give me a difficult situation and I'll work out how to manage it. Give me a round hole and apparently I'll spend an unreasonable amount of time shaving bits off the square peg rather than considering whether I actually want to be in the bloody hole.
There comes a point, though, when adaptation becomes something else.
You stop asking whether something suits you and start concentrating entirely on how to make yourself suit it.
That's where things get interesting.
Sometimes the problem isn't that something is wrong. It's that you've changed shape.
Nothing happened. And somehow everything changed.
I think we expect outgrowing something to come with an event.
A spectacular argument.
A terrible boss.
A betrayal.
Some great cinematic moment where we finally slam the door and announce, Enough!
Unfortunately, life isn't always that accommodating.
Sometimes nothing happens.
You just notice that something which used to feel natural now requires effort.
A friendship feels slightly different.
A job you're perfectly capable of doing starts costing more than it gives.
A lifestyle you worked very hard to create doesn't excite you in quite the way you thought it would.
Even conversations can start feeling strange. You're sitting with people you've known for years, talking about the things you've always talked about, and part of you is hovering somewhere above the table thinking:
I don't think I live here anymore.
That's a difficult feeling to admit.
Particularly when the thing you're questioning is objectively good.
Because how do you explain wanting to change something that isn't broken?
I used to think loyalty meant staying.
Friendships have probably taught me the most about this.
I have friends who go back decades and others who came into my life much later. Many began through work. Some have seen every incarnation of me, the marriage, motherhood, corporate life, divorce, reinvention and all the WTF moments in between.
And those relationships don't stay still simply because we have history. Neither do we.
After my divorce, I wanted different things from life.
I wanted experiences. Adventure. Travel. New people. New conversations. Perhaps even the occasional mountain, although let's not get carried away. A respectable hill will do!
That didn't suddenly make the people I'd loved for years wrong.
And it didn't make me right.
Our lives had simply started moving at different speeds and sometimes in different directions.
I think I used to find that threatening.
If a friendship changed, I wanted to understand why. Fix it. Restore it. Get it back to what it had been.
Now I'm less convinced everything needs restoring.
Some friendships stretch beautifully around the people we're becoming. Some become less frequent but no less important. Some disappear for a while and return. Others belong very specifically to a version of our life that no longer exists.
There can be sadness in that without there needing to be blame.
That's been quite a shift for me.
History deserves respect. It doesn't automatically require repetition.
Then there was the room I knew very well.
Work was different.
I spent more than twenty years in corporate HR, much of it in oil and gas. I knew that world.
I understood the language, the politics, the expectations, the hierarchy. I knew how to walk into senior rooms and hold my own.
For a long time, that environment suited me.
More than suited me, actually. I thrived in it.
Which is precisely why it took me so long to understand what was happening when it stopped fitting.
I hadn't suddenly become incapable.
The industry hadn't suddenly become terrible.
I could still do the work.
But increasingly I could feel myself adapting to remain comfortable in a room I was no longer sure I wanted to occupy.
That's a very different problem.
Because if you're failing at something, leaving makes sense.
What happens when you're still succeeding?
What happens when everyone around you can see perfectly good reasons to stay and you can't produce a sufficiently dramatic reason to leave?
For a while, I think I assumed the discomfort was mine to solve.
Be more grateful.
Get through this period.
Change something around the edges.
Take a holiday.
Stop being so bloody restless.
But the feeling kept returning.
This room doesn't speak my language anymore.
And eventually I stopped trying to translate.
Success can make a very comfortable cage because everyone, including you, keeps pointing out how lucky you are to be inside it.
We are extraordinarily good at making ourselves fit.
Women are particularly well practised at this.
We adjust. We accommodate. We smooth things over.
We learn what different people need from us and become remarkably efficient at supplying it.
Sometimes that's generosity. Sometimes it's love.
Sometimes it's professionalism.
And sometimes we've been doing it for so long that we've forgotten to ask whether the arrangement still works for us.
That's the part of the square peg analogy I find more interesting now.
The problem isn't always the hole.
Sometimes nobody is forcing us into it.
We're doing the squeezing ourselves.
Because leaving a familiar shape creates uncertainty.
If I'm not this kind of executive anymore, what am I?
If this friendship changes, what happens to all that history?
If I don't want the lifestyle I spent years creating, what does that say about all the effort it took to get here?
Those are much harder questions than simply deciding something doesn't fit.
And perhaps that's why we stay in things long after we've noticed the edges rubbing.
I don't think every uncomfortable feeling means you should leave.
This is something I'd qualify now.
There was a time when I probably would have said, If it doesn't fit, get out.
I'm less interested in absolutes these days.
Not every period of discomfort means you've outgrown something.
Relationships become difficult.
Friendships go quiet.
Work has miserable phases.
Sometimes we're the difficult phase.
Growth isn't a permanent instruction to burn down everything familiar and go looking for a more spiritually aligned postcode.
Sometimes the answer is to stay and have the conversation.
Sometimes it's to change the way you're participating.
Sometimes the room still fits perfectly well, but one of the chairs is bloody uncomfortable.
The skill, I think, is learning the difference.
Am I uncomfortable because this is stretching me?
Or because I'm shrinking myself to remain here?
Those are not the same thing.
Perhaps the peg was never the problem.
When I first wrote about being a square peg in a round hole, I saw the answer as finding the right room.
I still believe there's truth in that.
But I'm not sure there is one perfect room waiting somewhere where everything fits forever.
I've changed too much to believe that now.
The Life Edits itself is evidence of it.
I created something that fitted me at one point, and then I changed. So it had to change too.
That's life.
We don't just move between rooms.
Sometimes we rearrange them.
Sometimes we leave.
Sometimes we realise the thing we've been desperately trying to fit into was built around an older version of ourselves.
And sometimes, rather wonderfully, we stop caring quite so much about fitting at all.
Final thought.
There is something liberating about realising that not everything you outgrow needs to become a villain.
The job wasn't necessarily wrong.
The friendship wasn't necessarily false.
The relationship wasn't necessarily a waste.
The life you built wasn't a mistake.
Perhaps it fitted beautifully.
Until it didn't.
And maybe that's enough.
I've become much less interested in asking, What's wrong with me that I can't make this work?
I'd rather ask something quieter.
Am I still choosing this, or am I simply very good at fitting myself around it?
Because there's a difference between compromise and contortion.
One allows us to live alongside other people and realities.
The other slowly makes us smaller.
And if you have to keep shaving pieces off yourself to stay somewhere...
perhaps the peg was never the problem.
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