Belonging
“One
of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and
belonging are not the same thing. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and
becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand,
doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”
Brene
Brown (Daring Greatly)
One evening
at the writer’s retreat, the prompt was about belonging or not belonging. That
is such a deep question, I had trouble writing about it in the moment.
Belonging is not something that comes easily to me. We could track that back to
early family experiences, or we could chalk it up to introversion, or we could
simply carry the questions for a while. “To whom/what do I belong? To whom/what
do I not belong?”
As I’ve
written about before, I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in a mill town
in North Carolina. As with many Southern towns of that era, there was a clear
stratum of class—almost a cast-system. Some families were very wealthy, some were
comfortable, but not wealthy, and then there were the poor and the desperately
poor. One furniture factory owner was reputed to give each of his children and
grandchildren a million dollars on their 21st birthday. That could
have been urban legend, but it perpetuated the myth that there were very few
who could run with his pack. By the time I entered college, I was group shy. I
remember going to one sorority recruitment party freshman year, and when they
stood in a circle, held hands, and sang of their devotion to the sorority and
each other, I almost had a panic attack. I felt I was being subsumed into an amoeba-like
creature that would dictate the parameters of my existence. I did not join, but
the girls who did were confined to one floor of one dorm and instructed to date
only boys from their brother fraternity. Now, I know that there are many
benefits to being part of a fraternity or sorority, but at the time, I just felt claustrophobic.
I could
go on and on, but suffice it to say, my story is not unique. We all have issues
of belonging and not belonging. We marry to find our soulmate; in the workplace
we strive to “fit in” with our peers and not be an outlier. We try to dress
like everyone else, even when it’s not our personal style. We learn the lingo,
so we sound like everyone else. In other words, we conform; we change our
personalities, and our appearance to fit the norm.
We all need a place to
decompress; a place and a tribe with whom we can let down our hair, let down our
guard, and simply be who we are. We crave to be with people who “get” us, and
who understand our language and our worldview. We are, in the end, mammals who
need a pack.
Belonging is essential to
human happiness and was once essential to human survival. We know this in our
genes and in the cells of our bodies. We never stop looking for those
connections; in every new situation, in every new group we encounter, we scan
for kindred spirits. To whom do I belong? With whom do I belong. Where is my
place of comfort and security? Where can I be myself and still be accepted as a
legitimate member of the tribe? These are life-long questions. And, when we
find those people, we thrive.
In the Spirit,
Jane
1 comment:
This one really hit home for me. Thank you
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