I wanted to disappear. Then I wanted to grow blond hair and fit in. Here’s the truth about belonging and why I didn’t die my hair blond—at least not yet.
When I was 6 years old we moved to the outskirts of Paris.
There was an orphanage behind our house and I used to stand on the terrace looking down at the orphans playing in the courtyard.
“That’s where I belong” I’d tell myself.
I was the oldest and the only adopted of 4.
We all look very different today but as kids the difference was stunning.
Stepping stones, all a year apart, my sibs were towheads. Something right out of Scandinavia. I was suntan bronzed most of the year with tousled jet black hair.
My parents’ threw dinner parties and in keeping with 1960s decorum we’d line up to greet them at the front door.
“You’re all so cute but Rhegina, you look so different.” With a beefy pinch to my cheek. Well meaning no doubt. These weren’t malicious people out to hurt me. But at the time that’s precisely how it felt.
I felt cut to the quick.
I wanted to disappear.
I wanted to grow blond hair—towhead blond hair.
I wanted to fit in.
I wanted to belong.
What I didn’t know all those years ago is that all of us want to belong and even towheads don’t have any exemption on the not fitting in front.
Not only do we “want” to fit in, it’s a basic human need.
Not just a desire, but a core basic need.
Sometimes you just hit a stretch in life like middle school or a new job where you just don’t feel like you fit in. Those are times we all recognize.
They’re obvious.
They’re out in the open.
We can commiserate about them.
We can relate.
But then there’s another category—a far more insidious, comes at us out of nowhere, lurks in the background, right out of sight category of not belonging.
This is the secret niggling fear that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and we’ll never fit in. And if people found out about it we’d be evicted, ostracized, cast out.
These are our shadow parts.
I call them our shadow orphans. Those parts of ourselves that we’ve been told are wrong or don’t fit in or “stop that already.”
These are the traits and tendencies we’ve spent a lifetime trying to get rid of and yet, still here they are. Every now and then they rear up and we try hard to smash them back into the closet before anyone sees them.
Sometimes this struggle is conscious and we watch it play out. Far more often, it’s unconscious. We just feel the wake and quake of our perpetually lost battle to hide.
Tara Brach has technique I love for dealing with these niggly shadow orphans, these unwanted parts of ourselves—these clingy, whinny, addictive, darker sides of our beings.
She suggests that when we’re in meditation (yes, please meditate! It’s a life changer) that we just acknowledge these parts.
When we feel jealousy rise up, that we just acknowledge it and softly say to it “you belong.”
Disdain… You belong.
Rage… You belong.
Pettiness… You belong.
Fear… You belong.
Anxiety… You belong.
Loneliness… You belong.
Inadequacy… You belong.
And what starts to happen with this beautiful practice is that you really do start to feel like you belong.
And the more you feel like you belong, the more you can freely be yourself in all its full flavored splendor—with the good and the bad and the everything in between.
Because, you see, you really do belong.
And can you imagine what you’d be up to if not so much of your energy, albeit unconsciously, was being usurped into trying to keep those little shadow orphans hidden away?
I’d love to hear what your full of life self would love to be up to so leave me a comment.
