__________> belong <_____________

A doctor friend of mine assured me that from the cradle the child feels the environment, the child wants: the human being in him, in the cradle itself, has already begun.

 

I'm sure that in the cradle my first desire was to belong. For reasons that don't matter here, I somehow must have been feeling like I belonged to nothing and nobody. I was born free.

 

If I experienced this human hunger in the cradle, it continues to accompany me throughout life, as if it were destiny. To the point where my heart contracts with envy and desire when I see a nun: she belongs to God.

 

Precisely because the hunger to give myself to something or someone is so strong in me, I've become quite skittish: I'm afraid to reveal how much I need and how poor I am. Yes I am. Very poor. I only have a body and a soul. And I need more than that.

 

Over time, especially the last few years, I lost the way of being people. I don't know what it's like anymore. And a whole new kind of "loneliness of not belonging" began to invade me like ivy on a wall.

 

If my oldest desire is to belong, then why have I never joined clubs or associations? Because that's not what I call belonging. What I wanted, and what I can't, is, for example, that everything that came from within me that was good I could give to what I belong to. Even my joys, are lonely somethimes. And a lonely joy can turn pathetic.

It's like having a gift wrapped in wrapping paper in your hands - and not having anyone to say: here, it's yours, open it! Not wanting to find myself in pathetic situations and, for a kind of containment, avoiding the tone of tragedy, I rarely wrap my feelings in wrapping paper.

 

Belonging doesn't just come from being weak and needing to join something or someone stronger. Often, the intense desire to belong comes from my own strengths - I want to belong so that my strength is not useless and strengthens a person or thing.

 

I can almost visualize myself in the cradle, I can almost reproduce in myself the vague but pressing feeling of needing to belong. For reasons neither my mother nor father could control, I was born and just born.

 

Life made me belong from time to time, as if it were to give me the measure of what I lose by not belonging. And then I knew: to belong is to live.

And then I keep thinking that maybe belonging to someone is suffering, I myself have given myself completely to someone, I think that in a way I belong to them, and then the result was suffering, rejection, I keep thinking about the cradle and about the doctor's theory, and thus ends this ridiculous text about being needy and belonging to nothing