You’re not welcome here.

Do you know the feeling of sitting in a group and laughing at the right moments, nodding along, but somewhere inside you are just… not there?

That's me, basically every time my friends get together. All engineers. Someone's talking about a bug they fixed last night, someone else is deep in some system design debate and I'm just sitting there holding a sentence I probably won't say out loud, because what would I even add?

Nobody ever told me "you're not welcome here." Nobody had to. I just felt it, quietly, every single time. In the pauses after I spoke. In the way conversations moved on a little too fast after my turn. In the small, invisible math I kept doing in my head: do I belong in this circle, or am I just tolerated in it?

And underneath all that was this looping thought I have carried since I was a kid: why am I so strange, why do I feel like a misfit, am I doing this right, am I messing it up. It's like background noise that has become a part of me.

I used to think something was wrong with me for not having "the thing" everyone else had in common. Like belonging required a shared frequency, and mine was just… a little off. But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking to be let in. I started asking myself a better question: what am I building and does it need their permission?

It doesn't.

This path is quieter. Slower, maybe. Nobody's cheering me on when I finally get something right. But it's fully, unmistakably mine. Chosen, not inherited. Built, not borrowed.

So here's me, finally turning around. To the doubt that sat at every table before I did. To the thought that kept asking if I was doing it right.

And say, You're not welcome here anymore.

Not because I stopped feeling alone. But because I stopped needing permission to keep going anyway.

Thanks for this wonderful prompt Paulia Dianz . A ❃ and Hooria Akbar. Some of these questions have been sitting in me for years and this finally gave them somewhere to go.

Thanks for staying with me on this one. If you've got a version of that same doubt following you around, I hope this made it a little quieter.🌱

Until next time — Inbaa

**The Hearth Weekly Prompt #4 Winners of Week #3 ** * From the Genie to the Door: "You're Not Welcome Here"*

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