Braving the Wilderness

For as long as I can remember, patterns have pulled me in. Fractals repeating themselves according to some rule… As a child I filled my notebooks with them. But what truly held me was how the dynamic rules behind those patterns came to be.

Maybe because I grew up in different places and was always the “new girl,” working out the invisible rules of the rooms I entered slowly became a habit: who speaks to whom and how, which words they use, which behaviours are accepted… That urge to recognize and to name eventually hardened into a belief: that if I could recognize certain patterns in human behaviour, and tie them to what people do and feel, I would find my way. I began running little experiments on myself, sharpening the skill by using it to predict what people wanted, thought, and did. From where I stood, I was learning to say the “right” thing and behave the “right” way. That’s probably why, as a child, I always thought that if I were an object I’d be a mirror, a stage where whoever looks sees themselves, and the mirror disappears. That’s how I became an expert at fitting in, a girl who was no longer “a stranger.” Honestly, all it did was make me a lonelier one.

In this piece I’m thinking about being a stranger to oneself. My starting point is Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. Two ideas stand out in it: being in the wilderness, and true belonging.

True Belonging

Let me step back and talk about belonging first. We all want to be part of something, and we want that belonging to be real. For Brené, the drive to build a sense of belonging is really an innate desire to be part of something larger than ourselves. To her own questions (what are people trying to get from belonging? what are they anxious about?) she answers: people want to be part of something and to form a genuine bond with others, but not at the cost of their own authenticity, freedom, and strength.

Belonging is such a primal drive that it’s always with us, like an itch we try to scratch the short way, by fitting in, by seeking approval. Because being alone makes us feel as though something is wrong with us, and deep down we’re ashamed of it. But for Brown, shortcuts like fitting in or seeking approval aren’t just a cheap imitation of belonging; they’re usually the very things that block it.

What does it actually serve, becoming the things our parents, our teachers, our cool friends, and the world convinced us we should be? Yes, we “fit in,” and if we’re lucky we get a little applause. And then? Lately I feel more clearly that all these roles we step into and plays we stage serve to make us invisible. It’s a tribute we pay to avoid being left “outside,” rather than the belonging we were looking for. And we pay it by carving it out of ourselves, a piece more each day. This isn’t belonging; it’s a cycle of un-selving.

What happens when, day by day, we no longer know or remember the most basic things about ourselves, when we become un-selved? We become nothing. And nothing can belong nowhere, not even to itself. And really, it wasn’t even belonging we were after to begin with; it was true belonging: not conditional, not false, not something to be argued for and set on the table again and again, a whole belonging. So where is it, the author asks. This belonging that isn’t conditional, that withstands time, that isn’t swayed by passing feelings or daily dynamics, where does it live?

By its nature, you come to think it can’t be “out there.” It must be something inside us, rather than a belonging we reach through others. It’s about belonging to oneself. A belonging that appears only when we fully believe in and belong to ourselves, one that nothing and no one can spoil. In that sense, belonging to yourself means being able to stand alone in this absurd world, to bring the destructiveness of uncertainty, vulnerability, and criticism to its knees. That is true belonging.

The most piercing line here is this:

True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world; our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

In the Wilderness

Belonging to ourselves enough to be willing to stand alone: Brown likens this to being out in the wild. A solitude and a place of seeking dangerous enough to take your breath away, yet as longed-for as it is feared. There’s a word in English, sublime: a grandeur that stirs awe mixed with wonder, or with fear. Belonging to oneself is like that, being in the wilderness, the bravest and most sacred place we can stand.

Experiencing true belonging, the book continues, asks us to be wild rather than to subdue that wildness. It has to do with tearing down walls, abandoning our ideological constructions, living from the depth of the heart rather than from inside our pain. True belonging is never passive. It can’t be had by joining a group, by fitting in because it’s safer, by pretending, by selling yourself. It’s a practice that asks us to be vulnerable, to be, without sacrificing who we are.

These days we’re pushed to choose between staying true to ourselves and staying loyal to a group. We worry that our sense of shared humanity is thinning. We feel that what binds us to one another is, beneath the shared humanity and trust and respect and love, also fear, and the dread of being unvalued. We can’t quite say: yes, we differ in many ways, but underneath them we are connected, very deeply. In a world of “you’re either with me or against me,” it’s hard to speak of true belonging, of being in the wilderness.

Still, for Brené, to mend this disconnection we have to think about what being in the wilderness and true belonging mean for us. Because we’re creatures wired to connect, and the heart of a real connection is that we have to be real, whatever happens. To truly connect, we have to see our commonalities again. Death, loss, pain: these are the great equalizers. We need to come down again to the shared ground of the moment we offer someone our condolences.

What we need is to dare to be ourselves. To voice a thought without fear of being torn apart or of seeming uncool; not to speak only to speak; to open a ground inside us for listening and for understanding. If anything saves this world, kindness and understanding will. And day by day I’m realizing that the only way I can be kind to myself is to be kind to those outside me. The only way I can understand myself is to try to understand others, to make the effort even when, in the end, I disagree. And the only way I can belong to myself is to strive, each morning when I wake, to be the person I am. Every morning, once more.

Because true belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.

Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness. Random House.