This is what I think… belonging is found through recognition and the longing to belong is the longing to recognize and to be recognized.
I have encountered this quality of longing for as long as I can remember, through childhood, through my whole adult life. It has been such a potent kind of longing that it has lead me to entirely abandon myself again and again into the promise and the seduction that shimmers through the lives and the visions of others. This is a longing that has lead me through multiple experiences of addiction and of despair. I changed my identity again and again in the attempt to mirror, to be the one that would somehow activate this recognition within the other, and then I would belong to them, and then I would belong. I wore their clothing, I listened to their music, I read their books, I took their drugs, I smoked or did not smoke, I took up hobbies and interests, I spoke and moved just like them. And of course, I never found it, I never found the recognition I was so deeply longing for because I was not there.
And I am again lead to this question. Who is it that I am? I think I can say almost certainly now that I do not possess a core but a multiplicity of cores. Cores that come alive as they are seen, that beat and pulse through worlds of recognition and relation. Atoms change their behavior under observation, we bring one another to life.
These days I look back and I can see beauty within this costume game, this chameleonic game, the beauty within the longing, the projection, the transference, the mirroring, the devotion, the promise, the hope, the emptiness. And I am grateful to see myself as a storm, inhabiting an ever moving and migrating centre.