As you know, I recently returned "home" to attend the funeral of my brother Mark. At the funeral I met "family" I literally hadn't seen in years, one for 30 of them.
Can we "belong" to people we don't know?
When I showed up at the cemetary to say goodbye to my brother I was someone that none of my siblings or my father had met before. Whatever version of me they had known or thought they had known has been swept away in the joyous whirlwind of change that the last seven years since I met Selina has been.
After the ceremony there was a wake. My first chance to meet people Selina had mentioned would be effectively strangers. And this is exactly what they were...strangers. We inhabited different mind sets, different outlooks, different ambitions, different life stories.
I was in a room of people who all knew each other and whether they liked each other or not, at least accepted each other. I was the unknown quantity and quality. I no longer share the same surname, instead the surname I have is one I chose for myself.
My life story has been utterly different from the stories the people who are my genetic brothers, sisters, father, aunt, cousin, niece, great niece, nephew and great nephew, brothers and sisters and fiance in-law have lived. I have physically and intellectually walked in places they barely know exist.
Whilst they have raised families and held down jobs, and been what society asks of them and little else. I have wandered. I have struggled with shadows. I have dreamt, thought, fought and cried. Finally I met and established a healthy relationship with what I am. I have sat down with my personal demons and beaten them at their own games. I have re-invented and reshaped myself so completely that I struggle to remember who it was that I started out as. Lately I have begun to rejoice in being an Aspergers. Being different no longer causes the pain it once did. Now I can accept the joy in having a mind that works in a very different way to the minds around me.
Being different is one thing. Attending university and being taught how to think is quite another. I have spent the last four years learning how to think in a way that my "family" does not, assuming they think at all. The last four years have turned my curiousity from an aimless, ill disciplined wanderer into a focus, into something that pursues facts with a devotion and an attention that is apparently quite the sight and by some opinions at least intimidating.
The "operating system" of my mind has been changed and my intellect unshackled from the millstone of doubt during the course of being Tertiary educated. I know what I am and what it is that I want to do. I have the "big ticket approval" I have spent this lifetime so desperately wanting
Much of this is well known, I doubt if any of it is "news".
Still it leaves the question unanswered.
Biology isn't family. Mark himself proved as much. When he was dying the hypocrits who hijacked his funeral and mouthed insincere platitudes over his coffin were nowhere near him. More often than not Marks "family" were the people who treated him the worst. Yet he so hungered for and self identified as "belonging" to them, despite there being little or no evidence that they reciprocated these feelings.
For myself, I stood amongst this "family" and felt deeply alone. I knew and acknowledge that they have lived conventional lifetimes, yet I was unprepared for the gap that ached between them and myself. The gap "ached" because I had never expected it to be either so large or to be such a space I was so unwilling to cross.
For them ET had entered the room and he talked about the places and thoughts he had been to. They struggled and ultimately abandoned the search for reference points and commonality. Yes, there once had been a little boy and then a teenager who had the same eyes. No, that person had left for the south a long time ago. And whilst someone who had the same eyes as that long departed little boy walked the room and took photo's with them, he was a memory to all of them. He was as dead as the man they had gathered to bury. The man in their midst was unknown.
To answer my own question.
No we can't "belong" to people we don't know.
Belonging requires knowledge and a shared identity, a shared history. Things I lack in regards to my birth "family". And they are precisely what I do have with the family I am literally making myself. It is to Ariel, to Selina and to the as yet unborn Orson and William and whatever other children will bless this lifetime that I belong.
The Bowaters in Mackay....they are strangers I interacted with briefly and will likely never meet again. Whether I belong to them is a concept and a question that never enters the thoughts or dreams of any of us. It is irrelevant because it was answered the moment I entered the space they were in.
I entered that space not needing their acceptance or understanding and told them that in plain terms. In completing a Bachelor of Arts I have gained the acceptance of serious people. I also have the knowledge that I am by solid standards very good. I also took no effort in hiding what I am. I made no effort to hide the fact that in terms of intellect that there was a very clear intellect present in the room and I was the one who had it. They became aware that any time I wanted to I could rip them from whatever intellectual comfort zone they have...and still be at the entrance to what interests and motivates me. The deeper questions that occupy my pensiveness are beyond them. They inhabit a world unknown and unknowable to my "family".
When you are unrecognisable to the people you, on paper at least, "belong" to, then the question of belonging becomes irrelevant. In their company, the person I "belong" to is myself. I belong to the future I will have, a future that will be apart from and unknowable to the Bowaters.
I have answered my question.
