A Sense of Belonging: On Origin Stories, Memory, Identity

To what extent do we feel connected to our roots, our past, our lineage? As humans we crave context: facts, fables, stories, whatever splintered shards of meaning we can find - anything to scratch deeper into our evidence of being. 

Is there a primal cry within us all, one forever searching like a single soul-soaked ballad, to make sense of the ephemerality of our identity? And what role does our own history play in understanding our true selves?

We are built to ruminate on the past. We submerge ourselves in it, welcoming the shores of nostalgia to wash up inside of us, flooding every particle of us, with memory.

Anything can trigger it: the smell of a chlorine-bleached pool toy; the taste of a chip soaked in cheap vinegar; the metallic opening bars of a Cure song - and suddenly you’re five, eight, ten, seventeen all at once and all you want to do is cry but you don’t really understand why. Perhaps it’s an awareness of time gone by, of knowing you can never replicate that moment again - the inner aches of growing up.

When it comes to personal history, one’s own family can be precarious, unreliable narrators: scraps of detail salvaged from stubborn mouths; sombre stories exaggerated, their thrilled misery, gin-soured and tobacco-stained; dismal events remastered with butter-soft sentimentality. Truth, forever relative, history, forever distorted, through the crooked eye of the beholder.

Ever resilient, we try to find belonging in new spaces.

That’s the problem with memory. It’s selective, chameleonic - like water, a property that’s impossible to fix or contain - prone to sinkholes, and wholly unreliable.

We can never untangle our memories from the lens in which we view the world. And so our pursuit for self-discovery and truth will forever be in vain, filtered through the kaleidoscope of our indelibly subjective gaze.

Is there a different sort of knowledge within us, marbled into our DNA: the inherited lives of our ancestors, a legacy of ghosts running through our blood? A subconscious, biological knowledge, linking us perpetually back to the past in a silent dialogue with the dead?

Think of the totality of you: your habits, tastes, idiosyncrasies, the texture of your laugh and the rhythm of your melancholy: the entire architecture of your own internal atmosphere. Separate the nature from the nurture, and how much of that you is inherited, pre-determined from your own familial legacy?

Imagine if you could (literally) connect the dots of your own origin story. Lines drawn across world maps, national maps, maps that don’t exist anymore, of places with different names, of forgotten cities, evaporated worlds. Imagine what that would look like - all the lines criss-crossing, like frenetic spider webs, in one expression of elegant chaos.

It can be easy to forget this legacy, to shrink our stories, and ignore the extent of our historical inheritance but as Patti Smith said in the 2010 Pratt commencement address:

‘Never forget you are not alone. You have friends and family, but you also have your ancestors. Your ancestors sing in your blood. Call to them. And then there are your spiritual ancestors. Call on them. Allen Ginsburg, Walt Whitman — they are with you. Choose the one you wish to walk with and he or she will walk with you. Don’t forget that you are not alone.’

Often, our origins stories are tethered to a sense of belonging. There seems to be this idea that the real, authentic ‘you’ is somehow connected to your roots, that one should ‘be true’ to them. Even the language we use - consider the word ‘roots’- is hardy, wholesome, sobering. The weight of it feels robust in your mouth.

But belonging is a complex notion, and a luxury at times. What if you never felt like you belonged? For some there is particular comfort in returning to their roots: a passive submerging. For others, it’s what they have tried to escape. For all the outsiders, outcasts, runaways; for the the lost and the listless. How do they find their place?

Ever resilient, we try to find belonging in new spaces. It’s a curious thing, when somewhere or something pulls you in, like a tectonic force, and it clicks. Suddenly, you feel like you belong. You look back and it’s as if it was always there, waiting for you the wings, as if life before it operated at a slightly duller pitch and you hadn't ever noticed.

In a New Yorker interview, writer Elizabeth Strout explores the question of what makes us more, or less, rooted:

‘She told me she thinks of herself as “somebody who perches—I don’t sink in. So I feel like New York has been this marvellous telephone wire for me to perch on, and I can come back here and perch. But Maine people sink in. This is their home.”’

What ties one person to a place, community, identity more so than someone else? How do you become a ‘sinker’ or ‘percher’?

There is an argument to say that in the West, we are more rootless now than ever before. With the nuclear family in flux, notions of identity more fluid, do we feel less connected to our origin stories and more prone to create new ones?

Our culture of individualism (combined with technology-driven alienation and a hyper-globalised, politically fragmented, world) tends to create a climate that feels less rooted, less connected, and ultimately, more alone. But a counter-narrative is forming. Some argue that our increasing isolation hit such a pitch that we are now looking towards belonging and togetherness to salve us in this lonely epidemic:

‘Perhaps now more than ever, people have legitimate reasons for feeling alienated from the world and from one another — the greater the level of alienation, the more precious roots become,’ writes Christy Wampole, author of Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor.

It is thought that we are finding this sense of belonging, of laying foundations, in a resurgence of communities within our own geography desiring locally-sourced products, seeking authentic person to person connections.

‘It’s an awakening of our early cultural instincts to care for the common good,’ writes Peter Block, adding, ‘There’s an alternative economy emerging, and it includes micro-financing, cooperative enterprise, 50-mile food hubs and living within reach and walking distance’.

But it is a necessary component of identity to have an ‘otherness’ by which it is defined and this otherness - this ‘us’ and ‘them’ - can be problematically divisive. One of life’s great ironies: what binds us is also what separates us.

Places and people, stories and history, are what we attach to, to try and be sure we exist.

‘A desire for roots and rootedness may be acquiring a new importance in the global tangle, where certainties are hard to come by,’ Wampole suggests. ‘But I wonder sometimes if this root-oriented thinking actually causes many of the problems whose solutions we can’t seem to find. Think of your own roots and how much of your identity relies on them.

How many things that trouble or anger you relate in some way, if only peripherally, to this rootedness? If you were to suddenly discover that you were mistaken about your roots, would you trade in your Lederhosen for a kilt? How negotiable is your sense of self? How much do your roots determine your actions? What if you’d been born with someone else’s roots, say, those of your enemy?’

Here, Wampole poses a final, crucial question about our roots-based identities. How much of our identity is shaped by the arbitrary lottery of our own origin stories? Ultimately, how negotiable is our sense of self?

We are forever evolving, constantly changing - like cells under a microscope, pulsing hot with movement. Our identities are locked in a shape-shifting dance; a never-ending metaphysical waltz. And the capitalistic culture of the West survives on this idea, in order to constantly repackage and sell us a brand new lifestyle, a brand new ‘you’.

In the end, roots and lineage are there to pin us down, to literally ground us. Places and people, stories and history, are what we attach to, to try and be sure we exist.

Image credits: CC BY-SA 4.0 // Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons, No restrictions // UBC Library via Wikimedia Commons, No restrictions // UBC Library via Wikimedia Commons