I have been trying to prove I belonged somewhere for as long as I can remember, though I wouldn’t have described it that way at the time. It didn’t feel like trying. It felt like paying attention, like doing what made sense given the room I was in and the people who were already comfortable inside it. But looking back I can see the effort underneath all of that attentiveness, the quiet and constant work of someone who understood early that belonging was not something that simply happened to her.
Growing up I was tall and thin in a neighborhood where the other girls seemed to take up space in a way that made sense to everyone around them. They had an ease I couldn’t quite locate in myself, and I watched it the way you watch something you’re trying to learn without letting on that you’re studying it. Nobody was unkind about it. It was nothing that dramatic. I was just slightly outside of wherever the center seemed to be, close enough to observe it and aware enough to know I wasn’t in it.
The magnet school added another layer to that. I was spending my days in one environment and coming home to another, and after enough time in both I stopped belonging fully to either. I came back to my local school carrying the marks of somewhere else — the way I spoke, the way I moved through a classroom — and those things set me apart in ways I hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t easily undo. College wasn’t much different. I had a friend or two, good ones, but I was never quite inside the larger current of things, never part of whatever group seemed to form naturally around shared history or shared ease.
The military was the first place where that changed, or at least where it felt like it changed. People moved toward me there. Seemed to want to be around me. I noticed it because it was different from what I was used to, and I held onto it because of that.
But a pattern that has been running that long doesn’t simply stop because the circumstances shift. You carry the original understanding with you, and even when the evidence changes you keep finding ways to test whether the old verdict still holds.
A while back I left a comment in an online group connected to Chicago, people gathered around the shared experience of being from the same city. The responses that came back suggested I wasn’t really from there, not their Chicago anyway, that I must have grown up somewhere on the outskirts, anything that placed me just outside of what they recognized as legitimate. I sat with that longer than made sense given that these were strangers who knew nothing about me. But it landed the way it did because it found something that was already there, something that has been there long enough that it doesn’t need much of an invitation to make itself felt again. I’m still figuring out what it means to belong somewhere without having to earn it first.
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