The Gift of Belonging

Belonging is an important issue for all of us. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about this topic in detail until last week. I grew up as one of the only visible minorities in my class (and elementary school), and I didn’t really have Punjabi friends outside of school either. I was in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes until Grade 4, and because I mostly spoke Punjabi I remember I didn’t really understand what was going on in school in the early grades. I guess I had forgotten this part of my story because elementary school feels like so long ago, but two of my friends were talking lately about how these experiences affect our sense of belonging. I had often felt like there were two parts of me; one that my friends didn’t understand because they included cultural and religious topics that they didn’t relate to. I remember people trying to fit me into boxes. At the Gurdwara I was “shy and modest”; in my friends group I was “pretty”; and then in late high school I fit into the “smart” box. I just felt different, and I had different beliefs and values as a Canadian-born Sikh. At that time I wasn’t able to recognize that it was because I had different values, or because of my different experiences; I simply felt that I wasn’t comfortable and that no one box allowed me to just be ME.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I couldn’t talk about what it is like to be a female minority. I think there are many reasons. One of them is that I felt like I didn't want to take away from my appreciation for the life I have been given, because I'm proud to be both a woman and a Sikh (now I recognize that I can be appreciative and still talk about struggles). Another reason was that I wasn’t able to put my experiences into words, and I felt alone in what I was experiencing. No one had ever told me “me too”; that I wasn’t alone in what I experienced as either as a female, or as a minority. I didn't have those conversations. It is only in the last two years that I got to explore that. I heard that “me too”, and I realized I wasn’t alone. I finally got the chance to have the rare Punjabi friends to laugh about shared experiences, explore religious topics, share parts of me that I had never talked about with my other friends, and learn more about myself. It was nice to not have to explain what family means, what the Gurdwara means, the search for Anand, because on top of a shared language was a shared value system. It is the combination of these experiences and my spiritual journey that allowed me to put my halves together and feel whole for the first time in my life. For the first time, I belonged and that meant the world to me. I thought I would be uncomfortable forever, but it turns out the discomfort was from trying to fit into something that I wasn’t. 

Brene Brown writes in the Gifts of Imperfection, “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” She writes, “Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” It is hard to be yourself when we are surrounded by so many messages that we need to fit in, from TV to social media and the people we know. She writes, “From gangs to gossiping, we’ll do what it takes to fit in if we believe it will meet our need for belonging. But it doesn’t. We can only belong when we offer our most authentic selves and when we’re embraced for who we are.” It’s not an easy process and it can hurt at times, but it is even more work to live a life of pretending.

I think the process of belonging is deeply spiritual. It involves developing self-love in a way that we recognize God within ourselves, and have compassion for our mistakes and our development. In that process, we figure out who we are, we figure out our values, and we find our home within ourselves. When we are connected to the One Truth, we are authentic and true to ourselves in every situation. 

References
Brown, Brene. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing, 2010.