On the notion of belonging

What do people mean when they use this word, belonging? How about 'fitting in' or 'having roots'? I have never known, and probably never will. I don't know if it's a bad thing, or a good thing, or maybe even neither, maybe it just doesn't matter - but the hurt from always falling between stones or through the cracks, as they say, is real. I know that much.

My own sense of identity was always going to be a challenge from the start. In literature, love children famously tend to be part of plot devices where overcoming a great deal of difficulties is required. I suppose they make the perfect fit for all that is confusing, unclear, secretive, challenging - you name it. The very nature of a love child is to be ignorant of his/her origins at the start of his/her journey. Not only that, but there is also the premise of social taboo, of rules being broken that the child will henceforth embody. It can only get worse or more challenging from there, often building up towards the need to find 'oneself' in some ways. Exciting, isn't it?

Yeah... when it's not you, I guess.

As if that wasn't enough, my sense of identity was further challenged by a lack of clear roots anywhere in this world - and  I mean this quite literally. Imagine being born in one country, but the rest of your entire family comes from another, yet they never teach you their native language, and you barely get to see the rest of said family for most of your growing or formative years. Imagine that the few times you did get to meet what is supposed to be your 'family' (though at this point it rings false in your ear... it is just a word to you that lacks true dimensions) they would invariably make a point in making you feel like a stranger exactly because you couldn't even communicate with them? Or because you were this 'child from the West' who had it all, supposedly.

Imagine that you have to contend with that - something more and more people are faced with in the 'modern' world: finding your place in a melting pot - and then add the fact that you also have to grow up with a surname that is foreign in the country you were born in - meaning that throughout most of your life you find yourself being asked to explain yourself about how you're really from 'here' and not from 'over there' even though you bear the foreign name. That was the story of my life back in France... and in France, unless your name sounds very French, you are never really considered 'French'. So, I was never 'really' French in the eyes of the country I was born into, and I was never considered part of where my parents were from.

Nowadays, if one asks me what I consider myself to be - and believe me people ask all the time, they think it makes for interesting conversation - I just shrug and say: "European, I guess."

But in the end, all I know about the notion of belonging is whatever illustration, or definition, I found in books along the way. It doesn't tell me much at all.

And then I wonder... I wonder if it matters at all... does it matter, for instance, that I was a teenager when we moved to this city? I wonder what impact this had on me, knowing how confounded I was to have to leave the safe cocoon of high school to suddenly fend for myself in the City of Money pretty much overnight. One moment I was expected to play moody teenager studying for exams, the next I was walking down the streets of an unknown city at night with no clue as to where we were going. One moment I was the brainwashed teen slouching mindlessly in front of the telly after school, the next I was emptying bins in a McDonalds and going back 'home' to a tiny 2x2 metre room I had to share with my mother.

Ah, that very first week in London... I never wanted to forget the details, but I'm afraid I already have... maybe it just doesn't matter. I mean, I was never able to tell anyone the 'whole' truth about me because saying everything that's happened in the last 14 years would never make sense to others. I guess there was a fine line between simplifying a storyline and downright re-writing history, as they say, and I fell into the latter when it comes to trying to share my 'story' with others. Aren't we all guilty of re-writing our own stories at some point anyway? If our history books are anything to go by, I'd say the evidence is clear.

And life goes on... it goes on turning even as we find ourselves stopping in our tracks from time to time to glance back over our shoulder, and what we see is but a blur on the horizon. What once was, never to be again.

And if there can be no true sense of belonging in this life, then so be it. One has to learn to live without it, somehow.

Belonging, acceptance, fitting in etc... they all converge back to the same root, really.