And when I don't feel belonging?

Have you ever felt as if, regardless of where you are, you do not fully fit? As if you didn't really belong? Have you ever had this feeling? has already stopped to think about where this comes from? If you have done this exercise with yourself, you may have identified some explanations for this phenomenon: places you attended in childhood with people very different from you, you are neglected by important people of your coexistence, or some other explanation that can have found in your life story.

The movement of looking at its history and seeking to track these causes is valid, after all, most of us would love to understand why we act the way we act. Just as it is useful to identify when we are reacting to the present situation or our life story.

Anyway, I would like to point out another alternative to this because, even if it seeks the causes to be understandable, it is possible that: a) you do not find the cause of non -belonging and b) even if you find the cause, no changes the feeling of not feeling belonging.

and here is the “cat jump”. Maybe the perfect fit does not exist, because the pieces are not only what we see, but also the inner world of each one.

So how to belong if I can't fully fit?

Instead of thinking of belonging as something global, we can think of connection points. That is, points of belonging in each important relationship. I can connect with someone, without my feeling connected with absolutely all parts of that person.

For example, I can connect with a person who shares the same interest as me in sport, I can connect with someone else for their light way to live the life with which I identify. Maybe I look at some parts of these same people and can't fit these parts, but it's okay, because the part I connected with is real.

Sometimes we have a conception that belonging is only valid if it is "whole." In fact, it is very special when we find relationships that we feel we belonged whole. Of course they may exist, but this text is not about these relationships. This text is about spaces we want to be, which has something important and where we find people with whom we also want to be (after all, it is a valuable context for us) and with which we have connection points, or belonging.

Notice that I can belong even when I do not fully fit is very liberating, allows us to be in more important places and do what we want. After all, if humans are complex beings, why would our connections be?

This text is authored by the member of the Cefi Contextus team -Mariana Sanseverino Dillenburg