What does it mean to belong somewhere?
Belonging is not to be longing; belonging somewhere is your longing elsewhere softly blown away, if only for a moment anyway, a moment of being. Seems so simple. Yet I’ve had friends whom I felt could have only really belonged on top of the moon, resting their shoes in two craters and forming faces from the earth’s patchy surface. Family, friends, community, religion, nationality, education, workplace, online spaces and hobbies: the big old arbitrary list says that surely you must feel an innate connection to at least a few of these categories…If you are so lucky to have a home then belong to it, lucky enough to be in a community then belong to it and if you have your family and friends then belong with them. This is all true. Yet I’ve had friends who could only belong to the pock-marked moon. So, why is this feeling of affinity so finicky when it could all be so easy? We get older: a womb to rooms after rooms after rooms; but what does it really mean to belong somewhere?
One of the challenges of feeling a sense of belonging is fear. Fear fights affinity; the ‘right here right now’ gets stifled by the ‘what if.’ Why does a thirteen year old kid start to cringe and flinch during intimate family moments? As a child, their hand safely tucked in another’s would have ensconced the whole world into a hug. But now moments like these for the teen are frightening and filled with questions: are they becoming less similar to their family? Shouldn’t they be with their peers more? Would this be perceived as embarrassing? Is loving them too much now accepting that you will one day lose them? So the teenage kid finds it harder to feel safe in the moment and accept the moment; belonging gets tangled. For another example, fear can shift the closeness you once held to your hometown into antsy doubts about whether you would be greater, do greater and have greater elsewhere; whether this place has changed without you now or is it you that's changed?
Doubts deliver doubles and I’ve always felt that the strongest moments of belonging were so unique because of the special singularity they imbue; ‘this is where you need to be’: a feeling really rare in life. But just because you can find true belonging somewhere does not mean that you cannot lose it. Some people feel more at home in a television series or a video game than in their own life. Somebody else created something that was missing in their life which then captured another’s soul, connecting to them, a link of belonging. But if the show ends, the game is completed and the theatre or football pitch is left, a sense of loss and disarray replaces it. That’s what makes belonging so scary: it’s framed as forever but is often fleeting.
But belonging is believing in acceptance. The ability to be your essence and not give it a second thought, either around others or alone, either doing something or being somewhere. Acceptance is tricky but when a dog is taken off the streets and brought to a family home and shown the sofas and allowed to roam, it softly and silently learns to belong there, it curls up and it belongs. I think of the man on the moon and how his belonging there is so simple but maybe he hasn’t found it either, maybe he’d belong better on the tides instead.
So what does it really mean to belong somewhere? Finding community, feeling at ease, looking ahead instead of constantly over the shoulder? These are all signs but belonging is like a sea shell in the benthos of the sea, you can hear its whisper often but to catch it, you have to accept the waves.
Written by Ben Lynch (@ben_Lynch__)
Edited by Niall Carey
