Shit or get off the pot

I have spent much of my adult life seeking out places and circumstances where I’m not understood, or where I feel out of place. I like feeling out of place. This is my comfort zone. I associate this feeling of not belonging with adventure. When I’m on adventures I feel like my mind broadens to encompass the space inside and outside my body. The world feels brighter, and more interesting, like someone turned up the saturation by 25%. Adventure make me feel deeply curious about the world; for me its the ultimate antidote to cynicism. Over the course of the past 15 years, I’ve started to take the feeling of not belonging for granted. To varying degrees, I’ve felt out of place in every city I’ve lived since I left home at 18. Of the places I’ve lived over the past 12 years, Abu Dhabi feels the most like home. For me, in Abu Dhabi, the question of belonging isn’t even relevant. Of course I don’t belong there. My sense of ownership of the space was focused around my feeling of disjointedness and a pervasive sense of cultural, religious, and linguistic juxtaposition. To move outside of one’s ethnolinguistic or national bubble in Abu Dhabi means confronting all sorts of cultural difference. I loved this part of Abu Dhabi. I loved how easy it was to move between worlds there. I loved that I could go and have 5 AED Keralite thali for lunch at the port, grab Ethiopian for dinner, and then have world-class panipuri before grabbing a 50 AED cocktail at some fancy hotel. I loved the different lingua francas that flowed through different slices of Abu Dhabi society. In the port, it was this Arabic/Urdu/Malayalam/Persian pigeon language that is slowly dying out as the city modernizes. Within the superblock in the city, you could get by with Urdu, while you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t speak English at the nice hotels or restaurants. In Abu Dhabi, talking about belonging among immigrants was almost taboo; we weren’t allowed to belong, even though we all felt that somehow we did.

As I’ve jumped around the world over the past ten years, I sort of assumed that every place works like Abu Dhabi. I assumed that any sense of belonging was derived from embracing cosmopolitanism almost to the point of rejecting ones own provenance, and that ownership over the space was tenuous, fickle, and limited to one’s ability to own a business or apartment. I’ve felt out of place everywhere I’ve lived, and I just assumed that that’s what it means to be an adult.

Then I spent three weeks in St. Paul, the city where I grew up. I was helping my parents move back to St. Paul after ten years in Iowa. I’ve spent a lot of time in Iowa over the past ten years, even spending about 18 months living with my parents are the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am forever grateful to them for accepting an adult me into their house with open arms and hearts. I was never a big fan of Iowa. The town they lived in is a college town, and I felt like I never quite knew how to move through the space. As soon as we pulled my parent’s stuffed-to-the-brim Subaru into the driveway of my parents’ new house, I felt in my mind that something was different. It’s like I’ve been on a long, windy adventure that has taken me all over the world but that I was finally back home. My whole psyche let out a long sigh of relief, like sitting down in a comfy chair after a long day at work. This sensation only intensified as I spent more time there.

A few days after showing up in St. Paul, I went to the No Kings protest. Looking around, I heard a bunch of people who talked like me. I heard a woman talk about “grabbing a pop from her backpack”. Throughout my time in St. Paul, I found myself talking to people use who used the same idioms as me, and pronounce words the same way I do. I didn’t have to explain cultural references because everyone got where I was coming from. As someone who’s spent so much of my adult life deliberately putting myself in situations where I am not understood, it was delightful and refreshing to be able to speak with the assumption that the person I was talking to would understand me.

At that same protest I saw a bunch of people who thought like me. People who weren’t content to stand by and let fascists take over the country. I was proud to be standing there with my fellow St. Paulites, my fellow Minnesotans. More than anything, I felt like a part of the demo, instead of being some sort of outside observer. When I attend demos in Berlin, I feel like I’m a spectator, not a participant.

For once, I felt a sense of ownership over the place where I was spending time. Not in the capitalist sense of having a title to the city of St. Paul, but in the sense that I felt like I had the agency, and even the responsibility to be part of the community. I ended up cycling past my elementary school a few times, and out front they had a little sign indicating that they were looking for tutors. I felt like they were asking me to be a tutor, not someone else. I saw so many places where I could get involved, from community gardens to tutoring, to volunteering. Instead of just consuming cultural artifacts from different parts of the city (eg, going to restaurants or shops) I felt like I could be an active participant in building the culture of the city around me. I have never felt empowered to do this in any other place I’ve lived.

To be clear, St. Paul is not perfect. It is a deeply unequal and inequitable place, along many racial, linguistic and socioeconomic lines. You can see this play out as you move about the city. I saw this play out all through school. You can see this in the history, and the stories we told ourselves growing up. Highways are these ever-present wounds that slice up the city, fetid and festering in their noise, and smell. I think spending so much time in Berlin has instilled in me a different notion of what a city should look like, and seeing the dominance of the car was a shock to me, despite growing up in St. Paul. I think all these imperfections endear me more to the place. It isn’t perfect, which means room exists to improve things. Moreover, I saw myriad improvements since I had last spent time there. It’s like other people want to fix things as well.

I don’t think I’m ready to move away from Berlin. But I do think it’s time for me to shit or get off the pot¹. I got a glimpse of what it feels like to belong somewhere, and I realized I need this in my life. I can’t keep living my life as an outsider or as an observer – I need to feel embedded in the community where I live. If I’m going to stay in Berlin long term, I need to find ways to create a sense of belonging here. I’m not sure what that will entail, but I’m excited to figure it out.