Belonging vs. Fitting-In

...making a critical distinction amidst the dangerous confusion that these are one and the same thing.

With great thanks to Margaret Atwood, who tossed the most radical (really, the MOST radical) permission my way when I was an impressionable, hungry, and lost eleven year old. She told me to stop seeing things as they are called to instead see them as they are. Words matter. If there are no words for an experience we’re having, or if the inaccurate words are attached to an experience we’re having, the results can be profound. Just as they can be when we discover there are exactly the right words to describe an experience. Words have the power to invite us more soulfully into ourselves and our experience just as they might reroute or erase our experience.

Back in the early 2000’s, when I was in my late 30’s, I found myself wondering about what I would call my radically morphing private practice. My sons were well on their way into the world, and I was half-way through the Yearlong Soulcraft Immersion program with Animas Valley Institute––an experience I was hoping would help me find the language to convey the ways I longed to serve the world.

I was pouring through deep ecology and ecopsychology texts when I came across some original essays introducing and advocating the Rewilding Movement. Rewilding is “a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems.” (from Wikipedia). The end result of rewilding, if successful, would be a bridged patchwork of wild stretches of land in which complex nesting ecologies can evolve and collaborate, for the health and wellbeing of the soil, biodiversity and so much more, including our wellbeing.

In discovering the Rewilding Movement I felt I’d finally found a clear ecological framework for what it was I was already attempting to do with humans––support the process by which wide stretches of our psyches, souls and bodies might be reclaimed by the intelligent wilderness which we all come from.

After taking some big deep breaths and doing far too much internet research, sending exploratory beacons out into the void looking for where the term rewilding was being used, I couldn’t find a single instance of its use in reference to our human process.

With more than a little bit of humility, I called my private practice The Rewilding. I’ve managed to remain small potatoes over here in my little corner of the cosmos, and I’m very happy with that, consistently making choices to keep myself that way. But clearly I was onto something with the whole rewilding idea because within two years of being happily in the deep end of my newly contextualized work, I began to notice the word rewilding cropping up all over the place. I was even flattered (and certainly annoyed and then of course dismayed) when, several years into this work (but still almost fourteen years ago), I got a ‘cease and desist’ letter from a young woman in Australia who claimed she’d invented rewilding (for women)! She had even trademarked the term, and was now insisting I rename my business. (I hadn’t yet heard of the awe-inpiring Gina Chick––the winner of Alone Australia––but of course, though she too calls her work Rewilding, this woman was not her.) Of course that claim went nowhere because I’d started using the term while she was still in high school. But wow. Imagine thinking we can own rewilding. Isn’t this all the proof we need for why we need to embrace the legitimate process of it ? Anyway, that’s not the point of this essay. And in fact, I gave up using the term years ago when it became so popular among therapists, coaches and others that it ceased to have any meaning. Worse, it often conveyed something that was nearly anathema to true ecological rewilding.

It’s no surprise that, as of a few years ago, the word Belonging went the way of Rewilding. All of a sudden belonging was the new buzz word tossed around in weekend workshops, and by opportunistic coaches and well-meaning therapists alike. While I could do nothing to rescue rewilding from the endless undermining of a culture that has become so very efficient at eradicating a thing that is part of our basic well-being then feeding an ersatz version of it back to us as if it’s just been invented and is sure to save us, I feel ruthless about protecting belonging from the clutches of pop culture.

Why do I feel so desperate to keep the word belonging sacred? Because the more the words that describe the most important experiences of our humanity are colonized and turned into commodities the more difficult it is to remember how to be human. Words matter. Their meaning matters.

So what’s so special about belonging? I’ll start by making a distinction: there is belonging and there is fitting-in. And they are antithetical to one another.

Our belonging is a given. We are here, therefore we belong. It is not our belonging that we need to figure out or cultivate or learn to manufacture. It is our experience of our belonging. I’ll describe more about belonging and how it might be that we can strengthen and tend to our experience of it, in follow-up essays. For now, I simply want to make a distinction between belonging and fitting-in, to give you something to chew on

.Even though we all belong (it’s a fact…we are here, therefore we belong), it is no surprise that many of us feel like we don’t. Capitalism and certainly the consumer-conformist society can only survive if we have been orphaned from our belonging. Cultivating a solid experience of our belonging is really the most important work we must engage in as humans, work that well (enough) cultures are almost exclusively focused on and oriented around. And for good reason. Humans who do not experience their belonging are dangerous and vulnerable. We are susceptible to erroneous narratives about what is valuable, important, and worthy. Worse, we are vulnerable to despair, anxiety and depression, destructive rage and endemic, untreatable self-loathing that masks itself as narcissism and other diseases that are on the rise. We humans have been blessed (and burdened) with a unique kind of consciousness that doesn’t fair well when we are cut loose from a sense of our belonging.

The processes by which we cultivate an experience of our belonging are always collaborative ones, requiring assistance from not only our human kin (and elders in particular) but the wisdom and creativity of other-than-humans. And of course this would be the case, because our experience of our belonging (or not) has a tremendous impact on everything and everyone around us. A human who does not experience their belonging––who is not oriented around their belonging––is dangerous to life.

It might be no surprise to many of us that our society has worked to obfuscate belonging, merging it with fitting-in as if they are they same in a kind of these are not the droids you’re looking for sort of bait and switch. When, in fact, we cannot belong to society. Nor can we belong to our family, or our partner, or our job, or even our dog. Not even our dog! Though I will say that’s it’s likely we could learn a thing or two about belonging from our dog. I certainly learn a thing or two everyday about belonging as I watch Ruby and Snugs careen like rapturous Ewoks through the Ponderosa Pine forest on our favorite trail runs. We can only belong to that which we come from, to which we shall return (whether or not we ever acknowledge this true parentage). Therefore, we can only ever belong to The World (as in, the Grand Ecology, Life).

The most efficient processes by which we come to a resilient experience of our belonging are authentic initiatory experiences. Instead we’ve been offered…you got it…a myriad of expensive programs that promise us rites of passage, from which we are guaranteed to be delivered, on the other side, as a completely new version of ourselves. Yet, authentic initiatory experiences are not things we schedule and take time off from work to go get. They do not come with a packing list and requests to car pool. And in truth, they often take months if not years to traverse through.

Perhaps most important, in order for an initiatory experience to assist us to fully inhabit our belonging, there has to be a possibility that we won’t make it. As in, that we might die. As in, dead. A true initiatory experience requires a death of some kind. Often times the death is an identity or concept or view of the world or narrative. It must be a significant death in order to forge us, call us forward, into a life in which we will do (almost) anything and everything to serve The World in only the way we can. Again, this is a tremendous and vast thing that I’m reducing to a few sentences, for the purpose of making a distinction between belonging and fitting-in.

Interestingly, in order for us to fit-in, we must undergo the very opposite process with one exception. In order to fit-in there is also the requirement of a death––the death of our brilliant, and ecological necessary, unique shape. Beyond that, the process by which we fit-in bears no resemblance, is an exact opposite process, to the one by which we come into intimate relationship with our belonging. Rather than discovering how it is we are each uniquely designed and oriented to belong to and therefore tend to The World, we are required to fit ourselves into an already-existing shape and make the best of it. The expectation is that we will be the best version of that already-existing shape (the very best executive coach who specializes in…say…helping her clients cultivate ‘belonging in the work place’, just for instance). Fitting-in is a process of conforming ourselves to the demands of the society. Fitting-in requires of us that we, at least tacitly, unconsciously, accept that we work for society. Not the other way around.

Whereas belonging is the ecological process of living ever-more into the unique shape we alone were born to be, in service of ourselves and the Grand Ecology of The World. As a mother of two, I can remember my rage and heartbreak as I realized that, as a parent, I was expected by society (and even by my own well-meaning but largely asleep parents, and certainly by my community), to teach my children to fit-in rather than to belong. I was expected to be excited about team sports and academics. By the time they were in the seventh grade I was expected to focus on what college they would go to. I was expected to teach them exactly why it is they should be almost exclusively oriented to these things. If I managed this, on their first day of college, I could sit back and feel I’d fulfilled my role as their parent. The rage and heartbreak came in tidal waves as I realized the no-win situation I was in.

Because, as you may have already realized, one of the very few either/or situations in the entire world is this one, right here.

We can either belong, or we can fit-in. It is not possible to do both.