Belonging Was Never Taught to Me

but who would have learned to belong in a house so full of pain

Is it possible to not belong anywhere?

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I think I learned that belonging was too permanent for me at a young age. One of my earliest memories, actually one of the few memories, is a faint moment inside my childhood home. The one I would move out of before I was old enough to start school. I do not remember the last night. But the house remembered the next time I stepped foot in it. Yet, all I remembered was that I did not belong in my home.

I moved out by force long before a sense of connection could be created. My mother was going to rehab. My father was going back to his wife. I was going to my grandparents. I moved into a room that was not meant for a child. It was meant to be the guest room for two people who have already raised their kids. When my mother returned home, early and unsurprisingly not changed, I did not leave.

The thing is, my childhood room stayed the same - a shrine to the past. Untouched. Even when the storm destroyed what was left of the ruins that my mother’s addiction had caused. The bedroom stayed dusty but otherwise completely untouched in time. It almost seemed permanent until I tore the closet shelves out and ripped it apart, giving away anything of value and throwing away anything that should have had sentimental value. The truth is that everything that should have been special felt all too fleeting in the hands of someone who had no childhood memories of their childhood home beyond leaving.

I think I learned then that I was not meant to belong with my parents. They would go on to have whole lives in front of me, and I was merely existing until the day I packed my bags.

I learned I did not belong in the town I had lived all my life in.

We drove past the house on the corner of our small town. The kind of town so rural and small that red lights are too big city for it. I still remember the feeling of being in the back seat of the car, driving through what was considered a populated area.

I heard the words from the front seat: “They never leave their house. They are perverts. They are gay.” I knew I would never belong in that town. I would never belong in that car. Thankfully, the car was totalled or maybe repo’d. All the cars of my childhood seemed to be as fleeting as the memories attached to them. But the words stayed and wrapped themselves into my memories like kudzu strangling out the positivity it could find. I would not tell the truth for years. I would not accept who I am for another decade beyond that. I knew I would never belong in a town that saw queerness as a collective, unforgivable, social plague.

I cycled through schools, connections, and towns. I never learned to belong in them. Maybe I did not want to belong because that meant it would hurt to have it ripped away. Maybe I never had the time to learn to belong in a place that was so fleeting. Maybe I did not want to belong anywhere because that might make all the pain of the past real.

I moved to college. I met new friends. I joined organizations. I found my first job. I thought I’d found where I belonged. I had people around me who cared for me, a place to sleep that had locks that could forge a sense of security - even if it was a false belief. A dorm of four walls, with a wardrobe instead of a closet, and chipped paint became the first home that felt like mine.

I thought I had learned to belong in that dorm with the people around me. But come to find out, every semester and every year was full of people who were just as fleeting as everything else in my childhood. I would end up being the next fleeting person who left before they found a sense of belonging and reasoning in someone else’s story. The doors shut on that first job. The business was older than I had been conscious, but it no longer belonged in a modern world with the internet. The physical books were no longer needed in a world where digital shelves could take up less room in the lives of others.

Since then, I have packed my life up more times than I can count. I’ve moved cities, states, and communities. All of them are full of memories and people I miss to this day. But in none of them did I ever find a sense of belonging.

I am not sure I will ever obtain a sense of belonging with someone or in a place, but I will keep searching for it in every new place and face.

Despite not learning to have a sense of belonging in the home I came from or the community I was born into, the craving to belong found me as I left. I might not have a place or person I feel I belong with yet, but I am chasing the hope of having a sense of belonging.

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