Assigned, Not Chosen. 8/4/2025

8/4/2025

Assigned, Not Chosen

There’s a certain kind of weight that builds when you start thinking you’re not wanted. It doesn’t show up all at once. It starts as a question, small and quiet. Why don’t I feel like I belong here?

It happens easily in restaurants. Especially in front-of-house, where the surface looks social, even friendly, but everything underneath is driven by incentive. Tips. Territory. Trust. In a pooled house, everyone shares the outcome. There’s room to help each other because the reward is collective. But when tips are split individually, the game changes. When you’re assigned to work in a popular section of the restaurant, your earnings are higher. That section becomes a resource. Coworkers become competition. Survival shifts from collaboration to quiet calculation. And if you’re new, you feel it immediately.

The sections you’re given. The way people speak to you. Who gets acknowledged, and who gets left out of the loop. It’s easy to mistake all of it as something personal. And once you start seeing it that way, it’s hard to see anything else.

Eventually, I stopped looking for emotional logic in a system that was never designed to provide it. Not because I gained perspective. Because I got tired. Tired of misreading structure as intention. Tired of waiting for inclusion in a space that doesn’t build itself around anyone.

Restaurants are built to serve guests. That is the priority everything else is shaped around. The team is assembled based on who can uphold that standard, not around anyone’s personal comfort.

So when a coworker recently said she didn’t feel like she fit in, that maybe this place wasn’t her rightful space, I understood. Not just the feeling, but the framing behind it. That quiet rewriting of what this job was supposed to be.

None of this is warm. But it’s not malicious either. It’s just the structure doing what it does.

When you start measuring your value by how well you fit into a system that wasn’t built to consider your feelings, it’s going to hurt. It’ll feel like rejection. It might even feel cruel. But it’s not cruelty. It’s just how the system protects itself.

Maybe ask yourself. Did you apply to this job so that you could fit in?

Because if that wasn’t the reason, then maybe there’s no real problem. Just a misplaced expectation.

You were assigned, not chosen. But you still have a chance to choose how you show up.

No answers here.

Just crossed popodoodle’s mind.