Belonging

 To Belong in this World

By: Aryan Mukherjee

“You Belong”. “Love Yourself”. “Be Yourself, Because Everyone Else Is Taken”. I see these words strewn from poster to poster, plastered along the walls of every classroom and sprung to life from the vapor of the teenage breath on the mirrors of their school bathrooms. But just like vapor, those words of feigned encouragement are chiseled into your brain for just a few moments before disappearing along with the rest of the day’s grievances, and belonging acts as myth portrayed only in the most fanciful of legends that you hear before being tucked in to sleep at night.

Splash! The water curls its arms around me and I am lurched forward into a spiral of lightning fast strokes, as thunder chants my name from all sides. As I just barely snag the gold medal, a rush of paparazzi spawns in, from mobs of clout-hungry stans to clusters of random civilians whose piqued interests morph them into my number one fan despite not even knowing my name a few seconds ago. And as for John, the ordinary boy with an ordinary skill set who came but nanoseconds shy of the prize, his body lies a lump in the corner, a checkpoint for people to scurry past before seeing the star of the show.

The truth is that the belonging people feel as emanated by their skills and success is but a ruse that our power-hungry society has deemed normal in order to gain just a little bit of prestige through their connections. Belonging comes from the people that pick you up, dust off your pants, and hand you an ice cold root beer to celebrate you, even if your name is John and you weren’t number one. Belonging comes from when I give my friend a hug and we sit for hours as he cries and cries until all the world’s desserts envy the parched state of his eyes, and he tells me how he misses his mother. Belonging drizzles down that chocolate covered strawberry that my brother savors after a long day at school and even longer day in the hospital, as we watch the sunset in tranquility and he rubs ice on his swollen, battered nose. Belonging rumbles in the chorus of laughter as my friends take turns uttering the strangest of jokes at half past one on a school night, as our velvet red eyes the next day tell a story far deeper than any book we’d ever read. Most of all, belonging is created in my life when the whole world has turned its back on me to fend for my own in a chamber entombing every little trauma and insecurity I’ve known, yet a dozen familiar arms drag me out by my hind legs in the nick of time before I too am buried by an endless list of all the world’s expectations.

Finally, to every school out there smirking at their competence and inclusiveness then acting baffled as more and more youth come out in steepening bouts of depression, a bit of food for thought. Rather than simply giving children a million different options to “find their place” in society and ending up with a million different adolescents all stuck somewhere where they feel they don’t belong, truly scour for passion, plucking out students straight from their comfort zones and into the place you feel may be right for them. Even if the effort is met with a scowl or countered by instant opposition,  simply trying can go a long way towards promoting communities built on happiness and achievement, and most importantly, cultivating a sense of belonging in this world.