Thoughts on "belonging"

Belonging, Destiny and Difference

When I think about belonging somewhere two things come to mind. That I'm supposed to be somewhere else - that my destiny is elsewhere. And second that I am so different and so alone that I don't belong here. It's the ultimate question "why I am here?" "Why don't I fit?" "Where should I be and who should I be with?"

There's a story from the Old Testament about a woman called Ruth. She married an Israelite but was from another nation. Her husband dies before they have any children and her mother-in-law asked her leave. But Ruth replies: "Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me." (Ruth 1:16-17 NIV) This is how we are supposed to assimilate - to make ourselves belong where we are different.

But it is our sense of belonging forms a part of our identity. Along with our memories and our dreams it helps constitute a sense of Self - it establishes our story. It answers all the questions: "Where do you come from?"; "What do you do?"; "What's your name?"; "Do you drink coffee?"; "Do you believe in... ?"

I've never belonged. I've always been the shoe that didn't fit. The clown at the funeral. The sober one at the party. I've always felt the pressure to belong but I've never really wanted to - my alterity makes me ... disturbing to 'normal' people. Out here there are no rules or at least the rules the others live by don't apply. I didn't experience empathy from other people until my twenties. even among my "friends" & girlfriends, nobody wanted to understand me or why I did was not the same. I felt isolated and nobody could understand what made me feel this way. I looked the same. I spoke the same language. But I would not be Ruth among the Israelites - their god is not mine, our language is theirs and not mine, their music, their sports, their history, their ambitions, their politics - none of them mine.

It took me a long time, a very long time to consider that I might be in a position of power that by being an Outsider I have choices that no one else would have to make. I would have to ask myself questions that no-one else has to ask.

It's these things, these questions that make us feel we belong. It's what we take for granted. What we expect, assume and demand