#188 Does Space Gain New Dimensions When We Belong?
On belonging as something the body recognises before the mind
(This letter is a response to Ujwalla’s beautiful edition of the nook)
Dearest,
I realised, while reading your words, that I feel belonging only when I can stop thinking.
If I am thinking, I am not belonging. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it feels true in my body.
Belonging, for me, is pure presence. It is something I have felt with my parents, with the man I have foolishly loved, with a handful of friends, and—strangely—with a couple of people I was meeting for the first time.
It makes me wonder: is it something about how they hold the space around them that allows me to ease into it? Or does the space itself gain another dimension, one that can hold this version of me?
And if so, what are those dimensions? Can they be recreated? Is that even in my hands?
When the Body Stops Negotiating
When I belong, my body feels like air.
I am not in my body. I am the body.
I am not breathing. I am breath.
There is no reaching, no huffing or puffing, not externally, not internally. No scanning for where I should stand or how much space I am allowed to take. Belonging quietens that constant negotiation. My body stops thinking that it is taking up space. It becomes the space it occupies.
Belongingness and non-belongingness announce themselves through the same medium but differently.
I feel sleepy when I don’t belong, and I feel sleepy when I do but the quality of that sleepiness is not the same. One is an escape. The other is a surrender. It has taken me years to learn the difference between the two.
Solitude as Shelter
When I belong, everything feels like air. Breathing is easier. And paradoxically, the place where I feel this most reliably is when I am alone, in a locked room, belonging only to myself. That is when I am happiest.
My days are for everyone. My nights are for my days. And there is a small sliver between day and night (me, alone in my room) where I belong fully in my body, and in the space around it.
Trust, and Its Fractures
Trust, though, has been harder.
My trust has been broken most often by the people I have loved the most. In small, precise ways that leave their own kind of bruise. So now, belonging comes to me only in glimpses. I don’t know if it will ever be a state that stays. Perhaps it was never meant to.
I know, however, where I stayed longer than I belonged. It was in a relationship.
In a country. In the promise that I would never change.
I also know where I’ve never left before I was ready. I don’t quit easily. It is my best and worst quality.
The Anchors That Vanished
My grandmother died when I was twenty. My father died when I was thirty.
With them, it felt like parts of me left too. I belonged in them, or to versions of myself that existed only through them. And yet, even before loss, I was restless when with some people and at peace when alone. Playing with my toys. Weaving my own worlds. No one needing me for a while.
Familiarity Is Not Belonging
There are also things I mistook for belonging because they were familiar.
Anger, for one.
My father was an angry man (he had shades). Over time, I became fluent in it. I lived inside an angry man and mistook him for myself. It took a long time to realise that familiarity is not the same as belonging.
A Different Definition
What your reflections offered me was not an answer, but a permission: to think of belonging not as a place to secure, but as a state that arrives when the body feels safe enough.
And maybe belonging isn’t a space where we stay but halt for a while and then go back into the world.
With love,
Ree