Belonging

I have always struggled to belong to spaces. Those I have belonged to, I have had to grow into stealthily, like a weed. 

When my son was small, I crept into the school playground on slow wheels and took a space. Every day, I went back and stopped still in the same place, and the loud, skipping flora and fauna around me grew bigger and brighter and began to sidle up to my chair to talk, weeds themselves. The grown ups’ smiles got more friendly until their smiles reached their hands. A wave, hello, good morning.  

When I first found the courage to go to the community centre on the way back from the playground, I picked a table with room for all my awkward accompaniments and I planted myself there, open and willing, until, one day, the staff knew how I liked my coffee and greeted me by name as they handed it to me. Belonging takes time and tenacity: I know this.

But weeds get mown, painfully. My son grew up and didn’t need taking to school anymore. The community centre shut its doors when the pandemic hit and now it is a different, unsafe place. Used to adapting, as all weeds are, I have had to retreat to my other, quieter spaces. The graveyard over the road; its towering pines and hulking yews; the squirrels that bounce along its ivy-walled perimeter alongside the long, weaving footpath through the industrial estate. It has hurt extra much, then, to face the reality of my changed vision as I tried to feel belonging in those places left to me. The view is painful, shifting and changed too. I have felt very shut out. Mown down again. There is an exclusion to visual difficulty that is a loneliness all its own.

I wrote last week how it has taken me some time to accept that I am going to have to grow and belong in a new way this time, but what I haven’t written about yet is my camera and how it is saving me.  

I have started taking it everywhere again. Squinting through its small window, I can see the world held still for me in small containers and I can see that the world I love is still there. As I am pushed around my special places, I use it to look at things close up, one at a time, rather than having to struggle with everything all at once. I am getting braver at shouting, "stop!" to my pusher when I see the blur of something I want to look at more closely. In those stops, camera held, body still, breath slow, I get to belong to something again. Better yet, I get to belong to a place that no one else can see: secret, private spaces just for me where I am welcomed, held. There is much to feel through those tiny windows. The textures of things, their moods, their thoughts. I stay there for a long time.

I have discovered, too, that with the lens I can create photos that better represent what I see the rest of the time: shapes, patterns, movement, small objects in focus while all else fades, the way the light feels solid. In those small moments of belonging, I can bring something back, just like I would bring back stories and spare cake from the community centre, or interesting leaves given to me by the school children who knew that I liked them. A new relationship is growing, then: something reciprocal. I move close and give something of myself, and something is given back.

I have been so tired and lonely that I think I fell into the habit of just sitting passively, letting the world swim past, or closing my eyes to it. My chair pushers are often too keen, too fast. I don’t like to be a nuisance, and careful looking takes patience. You see then how easily belonging can be lost as a habit? A behaviour? How easily you can opt out or decide it’s just too hard? I do now.

To belong is an action, I think, that you choose, that you don’t wait for. It’s something you do over time, with that old tenacity of a weed in the playground. It is an advocation you must make for yourself. 

My camera allows me to choose that again and I do so fiercely, happily, remembering that a part of me belongs everywhere, always, and that I can wield my belonging like a wave, a lens, an open hand. I am so grateful.

Find my photography on Instagram @porridgebrain

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