Lau de Bugs
journal
dev
1The Case Against Belonging
It’s nearly seven years since I first took in the air in this strange landscape from her raging hot Texas summers to her soulless New York winters. She aches with scars from a wretched past while racing uncontrollably toward an unknown future. Her beauty is layered and otherworldly yet punctuated with a haunted, storied underbelly. I know too little of her.
Within me has been a growing watershed of my childhood fading into distant memories that has become fuzzy. I write to remember the smell of earth – mud, the feeling of the piercing thorns, the dew that awaited me in the mornings. These are strange memories now. I beckon them to fill this yearning for a place I once called home, a people that once occupied my sensibilities, food that once warmed my soul. I am caught in between two worlds – continuously dipping one foot into This American Life and yet never fully leaving my Kenyan selfhood behind. My body keeps searching for a sense of belonging that is becoming elusive. This unlearning of my assumptions, unravelling of new ways of thought, peeling off layers of identity is agonizing yet so necessary in my nervous efforts to battle a despair fueled by the nostalgia of a former life that seemed so effortless.
I am terribly homesick. To emerge from my chrysalis requires work – an emotional and mental exercise that does not feel natural. I would prefer sloth. My body senses that it feels alien(ated), estranged, misunderstood. What is this agony I inhabit? In engaging this still seemingly foreign world, it hesitates and dares to fold into dreams from another lifetime. Where does this body want to be?
Mid-conversation, I am listening to the other person’s attempt to fill this hostile void that occupies that space between us. When we hit an inflection point where our lived experience shares no commonality, the mind, body, and spirit are hyper-aware of this chasm beginning to form between I and the other. We each make appeals in this exchange – to be understood, to be met at in the middle. Questions. Are they listening? Am I paying attention? We each attempt to contextualize our stories to reel in the other into our respective worlds. When it flows, there is a feeding frenzy of curiosity. They become interesting. I find myself performing often as such – trying on various arcs of the same stories to navigate different spaces. It becomes exhausting. How does this body that was raised under the temperate tropical sun resist the urge to yield when stretched to its limits?
My heart’s instinct is bending towards distrust; to othering – embellishing difference to use as ammunition in waging emotional and ideological warfare within unfamiliar territories. I am naïve to other worlds. Novel encounters, however, present an opportunity to work through my assumptions, to befriend this tension within me and perhaps to chip away at the fear of being dissimilar. Belonging, on the other hand, assumes a constancy to retreat to whenever I wish. The search for belonging brings with it a desperate attempt to return to formerly familiar grounds, creating a feeling of dissatisfaction with people who think, talk and simply are different from me. This search disregards those who inhabit even the slightest lack of shared experience absolving us of any agency we have in redefining what it means to belong. When I have let go of this urge to look for familiarity, conversations have flowed into uncharted waters, and I have been able to peek into other’s ways of being and experiencing. I am attempting to practice letting go of the search to belong, and perhaps this can yield a deeper empathy with this strange land and the people within her.