My poor wife has been person zero in my continued commitment to discovering who I am and what the world could be like without the confines of survival mode. Turns out that much of the time I’m like a kid who has had far too much sugar…
I’m talking. A lot. About whatever I’m reading or thinking at any given moment. I keep asking Gwennie if I’m boring her, and she gives me the oddest looks while shaking her head.
“Never,” she says. “I find you interesting and enjoy listening to you.”
Another friend, one of the few people I have been actively and frequently talking to without too many filters for years, tells me often that I’m one of the most interesting people she knows. It makes me go quiet when she says that.
My brain goes into a weird interpretive dance:
Interesting = weird. Weird = other. Other = unloved.
Acknowledging that there was once a time when everything I was interested in met with that response from my family is one step of the journey. It was true that talking too much about what I was thinking led to living in liminal spaces and not really belonging.
But using the word “journey” implies movement, so I take another step and focus on “there WAS ONCE a time…” and allow myself, my body, to feel the passage of time. The changing of the people I claim as family. The miracle of finding those who also claim me as their own. Yes, there was once a time. It has passed. What remains is to be brave and step into what is, now.
And so it’s time to revive this experiment of a blog. This “figuring it out as I go” approach to sharing what’s in my head and heart. Maybe someone else will discover that just because they don’t fit in with their family doesn’t mean they don’t belong.
Place your roughly hewn piece into the world in the faith that, wherever you are, another is elsewhere doing the same. If they aren’t, it is because they don’t yet know their worth. And if you don’t, it’s because you don’t yet know how gravely you are missed. Your small disappearances, your holding back, your choosing to forget, is what breaks the momentum of our belonging together.
~ Toka-pa Turner, Belonging