You Belong

My mother told me how, as a child, she was bullied for not being “Jewish enough.” Despite being the child of Holocaust survivors, she had a Catholic mother who dressed her in Austrian dirndls. For this, the Jewish kids at her Manhattan school picked on her mercilessly.

I grew up targeted from both directions: kids at my Catholic high school threw pennies at me for being Jewish; people in the Jewish community shunned me for not being loyal to Israel. By adolescence, I’d concluded that organized religion was little more than an accepted form of bullying. Part of me still thinks that way.

So it was strange when, at twenty-one, I met a guru in northern India whose sole advice to me was: “Know that you belong.”

Really? I thought. Did my ancestors belong in the eyes of the Nazis who hunted them? Do Palestinians belong in the eyes of settlers who drive them from their homes? Do immigrants belong in the eyes of ICE agents who deport them?

But over time I realized that “in the eyes of” is the problem.

We take our cues about belonging from other people’s fear and pain, as though belonging were something they could grant or withhold. But belonging comes from somewhere deeper. For everything that is, belongs.

Put another way: whoever says you don’t belong is lying. Not just to you, but to themselves. Think about how much people who argue for any kind of supremacy have to kill inside themselves to live that way. You can have compassion for such people even as you oppose them.

And then vow never to do the same inside yourself. Whatever there is in you that you believe should not be — anger, loneliness, jealousy, whatever — try to see it as inextricable from the life you've been given. It is our eyes that must adjust to reality, not the other way around.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

Sandro Botticelli, "La Derelitta" (1496)