week 15
barrier to free failing: fear of not belonging
This is my first late post since I started this project, and it’s very easy for me to berate myself for it (but I am actively not letting myself). I was blaming it in my mind on a lack of time, but I don’t think that was really it. I don’t think it is coincidental that I didn’t post on time the week I was getting ready to see my extended family.
All my life, I have felt like an island, struggling to feel like I belong anywhere. I am an only child. I am also the child of parents who had me later in life, so the discrepancy in age between me and the children of my parents’ peers was often big, sometimes very big. And I’m an introvert and generally have struggled with feelings of being an outsider.
When I was eighteen, I suddenly was introduced to many people on my mom’s side of the family that I had rarely (or never) heard about. Somehow we had floated away from the rest of that clan for quite a few years, and my mom and aunt started reconnecting (though some of them had previously stayed in touch with each other). The first big reunion I attended was shocking and overwhelming. I remember spending large swaths of time sitting with my first cousins in a hotel room on the couch, staring at a big table that included our mothers and their first cousins they grew up with. With each subsequent reunion it got a little less isolating and a little easier to feel like I was part of the family. My mom and aunt started doing weekends where they and their girl cousins would get together to talk and play games, laughter and wine flowing. Then they sometimes invited us “second generation” girls to join, and I really started feeling more connected. It felt like a small miracle in a way, because my whole childhood I’d prayed for sisters and suddenly I sort of had them.
Of course, when there is a large chunk of time being disconnected before reconnection, there is going to be some mourning. I see my mom and aunt mourn the lost time, all the years when they were left out of weddings, baby showers, and other big life events of most of their cousins. There is sometimes an underlying feeling of having to justify that they are as much a part of the family as anyone else, not just honorary invitees at reunions. And I am left without any of the anchoring memories that they have from growing up with each other, and still have to work and rework in my mind how we all are related, evening having heard the stories many times.
So I love my family and appreciate being included, but every reunion or girls weekend gets me a little anxious. It is easy to feel like an island as the only only child in the family, the youngest of the second generation but not really much closer in age to anyone in the third generation. I constantly feel like I have to make up for lost time, and have to work at not feeling resentful of the easy and immediate familiarity my other second-gen girl cousins seem to have with one another. I have to work to feel like I belong— or at least, I have to work at not counting myself out and feeling like I don’t belong.
This weekend was opened up to the third generation cousins who are over twenty-one, and it was both great to see a new generation joining the tradition and overwhelming as the numbers of people grew and people broke off into little side-groups. Larger groups often leave me feeling cold and alone, and looking around for another little island of people to join without forcing my way in. My one intention for the weekend was to not look for ways/ evidence that I didn’t belong (see Dr. Brené Brown’s “don’t look for evidence that you don’t belong, because you will always find it”).
Overall I did a good job, even when I felt a little left out, a little unseen, a little unheard. The last hour of the trip was the hardest for me, when one of my second-gen cousins made the comment to me “you’re not really a [second-gen], and you’re also not really a [third-gen].” It wasn’t ill-intentioned, but after hearing those comments for so many years and all my own issues surrounding belonging, it felt very othering and I was incensed. I know this is not what she was saying, but all I could hear was “you don’t belong here and you don’t belong there.”
I tried to play it off as a joke that I am second-gen “through and through!” and “will not be relegated to any other,” but it came across aggressive and defensive as my voice shook and my face turned red, and a couple other cousins also stuck up for me, knowing how much those kinds of comments bother me (I’m grateful). I think the bigger fail was in not having a more direct conversation that those kind of comments are annoying at best and hurtful at worst. Because I don’t think she really understood why I was having that reaction (she replied: “I’m the same way, I have one foot in the group of elders, and another in the middle generation”). Yes, but she doesn’t have anyone telling her you don’t really belong with us, and you don’t really belong with them.
I hope that at our big reunion in my hometown this summer that maybe I’ll have the space and the courage to have that conversation. It’s scary because the conversation itself feels like a big risk to belonging. The hardest part of this whole project has been the fear that it will alienate me from my family, that none of them will understand why I’m doing this or its importance to me and just judge or (maybe worse) pity me or choose to not see me at all. But as Dr. Brown says: “Our worth and our belonging are negotiated with other people. We carry those inside of our hearts.”
P.S. I failed at trivia, losing both of my team’s games. But I dared to give answers, some of them right and some of them wrong, and that’s a failure I can happily live with. Progress, not perfection. My family is already planning all the yard games we are going to be playing this summer, so I will mentally gear up for many more opportunities to fail in front of family (FFF)!