‘Belonging’ struggles to comfortably fit into my vocabulary. Next to the expected bones and muscles, a more fluid transiency is built into the foundations of who I am. It’s visible in my mismatched parental background and speech inflections that flex and ebb depending on who I am with, or where I am; in my inconsistent school years; in the widening miles between me and my family home as I stretch further away from childhood into adulthood; in the rolling waves of my mental wellness, good and bad.
As someone who spent the first two-thirds of their life in the same small town – treading the same green paths over and over, until I could surely walk them blind – I have been sought out by a subtle expectation to be solid and unchanging from the beginning. To acclimatise to my given environment; to slip into its fabric and happily amalgamate; to become part of the local thread. But life, with its people and experiences and unforeseen bends in the road, gets in the way of this – so, like many of us, I never did.
I sought this mythological ‘belonging’ at university. I wanted to feel linked to anything – a place, an idea, a person, a group, something fixed and unmoving that wouldn’t slip from my grasp or cause me to run with fear in the other direction. As children, and then teenagers, we are often told that university is the crucible where it happens: the ‘getting there’, the final relax away from the anxieties of young life, the freedom and time to choose who you are, the welcome introductions to others as shiny new person.
I studied for my GCSEs at home in between grey hospital appointments with long drives to builtup areas, whilst still in the primitive and angry stages of recovery from multiple illnesses. I then faced my A levels in the same morose glass box of a place, made up of adults who didn’t quite know how to talk to me any more due to my challenging states, and people my own age who never understood how sick I was and expected me, pushed me, to be just like them.
Surprising everyone, at 18 I eventually found myself unloading my belongings into the unknown of a student flat block, into a new room, at the start of a bright September long gone. I can’t remember the flat name or number now, but my window overlooked a bright patch of grass and some slim silver trees. The university I attended had several student accommodations dotted on or around three central streets — mine was lonely at the edge of town, like a satellite, half circled by a tall yellow field that rushed loudly at night.
I found belonging in some places and in others not so much. I realised that university is not a straight line of growing up and going through the expected motions: it can be joyful, awkward, wonderful, hilarious, awful, boring, exhausting, devastating, mournful, fun, embarrassing, rewarding. During my studies, the places and things and people I initially assumed would or should welcome me often eluded me, and (in hindsight) I failed dramatically to seek out those that would have supported or uplifted me. Acceptance and rejection came in equal and confusing measures.
But affinities found in unexpected places are some of the greatest joys of life. I first found belonging at a freshers party I’d been invited to, where I met one of my now closest friends (family at this point) who introduced me to compassion, faith, platonic love, and happiness in ways I had never experienced before.
I found belonging in the library at night amongst the metal rows of books and other quiet bodies. It was at the beach, in the wet snow, on the path that led from town across the river and through still back gardens. I found a temporary, but formative, belonging at electronic music evenings held in the town’s only real cellar bar, and gained true life lessons over fluid soundwaves, bright lights, dancing people.
I connected, disconnected, and reconnected recently with someone who has unknowingly brought an unprecedented level of friendship and care into my daily life as a now 26-year-old.
Belonging met me in some of my books, lectures, and teachers – in theology, philosophy, medical history, How to Survive a Plague by David France, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, two spectacle-eyed professors and experts on library history – whilst others didn’t quite stick.
I still have these books, at present resting happily on shelves curated by me and my partner in a rented flat. Looking to the future is notoriously difficult to do whilst in the grips of a large emotion or experience, university and the transition of child-to-adult included. But through the now-faint losses, wins, revelations, and blank spaces of my university years, I have slowly learned that true belonging cannot emerge without experiences like these; that the act of gathering yourself closer and closer towards people, places, and things who make you fulfilled continues in one perfectly timed, unavoidable, and brilliant spiral.
Main Photo Credit: Annie Spratt
