Like everybody else

I recently met a new group of people in Brooklyn and had an experience of myself that is uncommon for me. I felt really really ordinary, and in that ordinariness, I felt a deep sense of belonging.

For the majority of my life I have felt just on the outside of things, misunderstood, working hard to decode the rules of engagement. I’ve always felt to some degree, the need to explain myself in order to belong, in order for people to “get me”, to feel apart of, like I’m standing on the inside.

In the face of social pressures, adverse childhood experiences, and the coping strategy of internalizing other people’s confusion, discomfort or outright manipulative, violent behavior as something that must point to the fact that what makes me different makes me wrong, I’ve mistaken my efforts to fit in for real authentic belonging.

It wasn’t until I learned how to be with and tolerate my present experience, the disappointment of feeling misunderstood, and the pain of feeling separate from, that I began to see myself on my own terms and learned how to pay attention to THAT before paying attention to how others saw me.

I had to get SUPER honest with myself about how I was being and where that was coming from.

The good and the bad.

I also had to learn how to value who I am even if that makes me different, and feel into that as an opportunity for greater understanding of our shared humanity rather than more reason to defend myself for being me and standing away from everyone else because I couldn’t be like them.

I learned to see the ways in which my efforts to fit in were protective, strategies to get real needs met, how they helped me avoid disappointment and deeper feelings of isolation, how they were an attempt to deal with my INTENSITY and sensitivity, that everyone seemed terribly afraid of, quick to ridicule and were tragically under resourced and incapable of being with.

I realize I’ve been hell bent on getting in with the wrong crowd.

If you resonate with this and are ready to find out what living on your own terms looks like, perhaps now is the time to explore calling in some support!

But I also had early experiences of belonging that were surprising and unexpected, and paved the way to find true authentic belonging later down the road…

I used to meet strangers who I felt weirdly connected to in ways my closest friendships lacked.

It was something about these strangers, their oddball nature, their raw openness, that made me feel at ease.

Maybe it was loneliness attracting loneliness. Or pain attracting pain.

Maybe it was the plain simple way they spoke to the truth of their suffering, the way they admitted to their feelings of sadness, of bitterness that I was drawn to. I recognized those feelings in myself and it felt like no one was ever talking about that part of life.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time, I just remember feeling like conversations with these folks were sublime. Like I felt most alive when I was inside of them. Like I felt seen.

I could sense there was some bigger force tugging at things and wayyyy more to reality than I could ever see when I encountered a stranger who’d I’d fall in stride with. While my peers talked about who made out with who and what drama happened in the latest episode of the OC that aired that week, I found myself drawn to conversations about what made life hard, what made us sad, the nature of cause and effect and why some people suffer more than others and get dealt shittier hands than most.

Sometimes strangers would intuit things about me I hadn’t even fully admitted to myself, approach me and share their insights. They were wise sages that I sat with on trains, a man who repaired my shoes at an open air market in Detroit, an orphan who’d built a public art installation that took up a whole block out of trash…they were always simply there, somehow we found each other…

They seemed to be occupying different realities because of how they spoke and what they chose to speak about. Realities I felt myself occupying, always on the search for company. For someone who most commonly felt on the outside of where everyone else was standing, it was such a relief to finally feel IN the moment with somebody else.

There was a man David, a guy who lived in the Harbor down the road from my childhood home who used to come into the cafe I worked at for a coffee and cinnamon roll. He was there every weekend. One day he brought me a bag full of gooseberries he’d picked off some wild bushes near his house, and told me his story about his mother who used to put him in the oven when he was small and the time she held a knife to his throat. David never failed to share how much he hated women, but he felt like he trusted me. I was 15 when I met him.

David was offering me something I had little experience with up to that point, something I found was hard to find with most people. He was sharing his truth, all of it, straight up, no frills, without excess emotion. I was wary of David, I didn’t trust that I was the exception to his general disdain for all women everywhere. He didn’t even know me. How could he know for sure?

But there was something about him that compelled me, and I felt curious about his ability to open up with me and share the darker sides of his story. I was curious about the fact it felt like when we talked, it was as if we were sharing so much more than what I experienced with most people. It felt like we were sharing our humanity.

It took me a long time to feel the difference between company that makes me feel like I have to leave my reality and join theirs to stand with them, otherwise I’m standing just on the outside, not quite getting it, and those I can be myself with.

It’s taken some seriously painful relationship dynamics and massive effort to unwind my stories to realize I’d been searching for the answers outside myself, and while we all need people, belonging doesn’t come from transactional or conditional relationships.

It’s not I belong “if I can help,” “if I prove myself indispensable,” “if I do it right.”

Belonging is unconditional. It doesn’t need to be earned.

If you feel like you are trying to hear the person standing across from you but they seem hard of hearing, If someone is negotiating or denying your truth, your reality, your reasons…if they are failing over and over again at reciprocating thoughtful, kind, patient consideration as you express your experience, your half?

Perhaps they don’t have the capacity.

Your belonging isn’t dependent on their response.

Before you start to judge yourself for being wrong or rush to try to change, see if you can get curious about what might be getting in their way…

Ask yourself, is this thing (this judgement, assumption, compulsion) actually mine? Or does it belong to somebody else?

Too often we hand over our power to people who aren’t worthy of our assessment because we have a core NEED to belong. But we don’t need to shrink or deny parts of ourselves in order to do so. True belonging means we feel safe and dignified in our experience.

We belong to ourselves. To the earth. To God.

The thing that has helped me discern between authentic belonging and conforming to secure my place amidst the tribe hasn’t come from endlessly focusing on decoding someone else’s behavior and playing the ‘what if’ game as a way to avoid my own discomfort, or from defending my own existence when I’m inside of conflict…

It’s been to slow down and unwind from my heightened emotions and reactivity enough to see what’s really going on…

To access the somatic experience of internal safety…

To grow my capacity to be with the depth of my longings—not rushing to drink cheap wine when I yearn for the good stuff…

As we do this we build our internal safety…

Feeling existentially “okay” rather than relying on the external for approval..

It’s not “I don’t need anyone else”,

It’s simply my worth, my belonging, is not determined and based on how you respond to me.

When we do this, we shift from grasping for belonging to firmly embodying our sovereignty.

That’s the place from which we engage in true connection, relationship and community.

That’s how we shift out of our narratives of hyper-independence, and destructive collectivism into spaces of freedom that birth more freedom.

Over time my awareness has deepened and nuanced and I’ve become more capable of trusting what I am sensing. Trusting my gut and trusting when I need a moment to figure it out because whatever is coming through isn’t coming through clearly.

It’s not perfect, the patterns to want to secure my place amongst my tribe run deep.

Over time the codependent people pleaser in me has learned that it is not the end of the world to be on the outside looking in, because I know now, I’ve had the experience that to stand with myself FEELS better than abandoning myself to try to fit in.

The farther we are from our intuitive knowing, the more easily manipulated we are. The more likely we are to make decisions and affix to goals that don’t serve our healing and transformation. To combat this, we have to form the conscious intention to prioritize our inner life. To notice our breath, our bodies, our feelings. To step back from the fires of overwhelm and remember ourselves. It may feel counter-intuitive in a culture that is speed-addicted, but the slower we move, the faster our return home.”

— Jeff Brown

The more I am willing to be with ALL of me, the more I embrace the fact I belong to myself. Then I can get curious about what makes me feel a real sense of belonging with other people, then I have an alternative way of being I can TRUST that doesn’t cause me to shape shift to meet someone else’s idea of what is “best” or “right”.

The more certain I am of what is mine, the more clearly I can see what is everyone else’s.

“There is a special quality of stillness in a person who encounters the shadow wholeheartedly. Your body may relax in their company because it understands, in the subtle communications of their presence, that nothing is excluded in themselves, therefore nothing in you can be rejected. Such a person, who has given up guarding against the shadow, who has come to wear their scars with dignity, no longer squirms from discomfort or bristles at suffering. They no longer brace in avoidance of conflict. They carry a deep willingness to dance with the inconstancy of life. They've given up distancing as a strategy, and made vulnerability their ally.”

― Toko-pa Turner

It’s in the vulernable moments where someone decides to share their suffering, their pain, their truth and OWN it, that I feel comforted because I feel a little less lonely in mine.

It’s these moments where I feel totally ordinary that I deeply cherish. Because for so long my uniqueness and my quirks have kept me apart. And sometimes I really just want to feel like everybody else.

Thank you as always, for being here.

If you’re curious about somatic coaching and looking for some support, I offer a 30 minute free intake to explore how I can best show up to support what you are moving through and who you are becoming.