The Joy and Danger of Belonging

It is a holy thing to watch someone you love find a place where they belong. Because when belonging arrives, it shows up in the whole body—shoulders relax, eyes shine, laughter comes easily. I watched it happen this weekend with my eleven-year-old son.

He’s never been a sports kid. He’s always preferred books and video games. The video game love has been a point of contention between us—I’ve always believed that less technology is better for a developing brain. And yet, he lights up when he talks about his video games. So we’ve navigated that tension with boundaries: no screens in bedrooms, limited weekend use in shared spaces, balanced by the expectation that he participate in at least one sport.

He tried baseball and hated it. Basketball wasn’t any better. Soccer didn’t stick. Golf sparked mild interest, but nothing lasting. Eventually, he landed on tennis—not because he loved it, but because it was the sport he disliked the least. Even when he started winning matches against kids twice his size, he never looked fully alive out there.

Then one day, he came home asking about lacrosse. His PE coach had introduced it, and something clicked. The school didn’t offer a team for his age, and the only club in town meant a thirty-minute drive to practices and out-of-state games. I wasn’t thrilled. But he kept talking about it, so his dad signed him up for a seven-week intro course. His first practice was cold and rainy, and he got knocked around for two hours by older, more experienced kids. I expected him to say he was done and ready to return to tennis. But when he climbed into the car, soaked and muddy, he was beaming.

Since then, he hasn’t stopped smiling about it.

This weekend we drove to another state so he could play. Yes, that’s right, we’ve somehow become travel team parents. And I was sitting there in my folding chair, watching him score his first two goals, and screaming with delight. But what moved me more than the game itself was what happened afterward. At the hotel, his teammates knocked on our door before we could even unpack, asking if he could come play. Later, they invited him to dinner. I sat with the other parents and watched my son at the table—elbow deep in crawfish, telling jokes, animated and bright in the presence of peers who had welcomed him fully in their group.

He belonged. And it undid me in the best possible way.

The timing of all this wasn’t lost on me. While my son was discovering a place of belonging, I was sitting with the quiet ache of realizing I might no longer belong where I once did. I wrote something recently—something I believed would be helpful, something I felt called to write. Many received it with the openness and care I’d hoped for. Others did not. I was called a mean girl. A bully. An anti-feminist. Accused of jealousy disguised as kindness, of trying to police how women show up in the world.

And yes, it hurt—not because I believed the labels, but because they came from people I thought would hold space for honest, even uncomfortable, conversations. I used to wonder why people called truth-telling brave. Now I understand: speaking from the heart in a world that rewards performance can be dangerous.

And yet—what’s stayed with me even more than the criticism is the unexpected outpouring of encouragement. Women and men, friends and strangers, even writers I’ve long admired, reached out with words that grounded me. Many had been through their own fires after speaking up. They knew what it cost. And through their kindness, I was reminded of something beautiful: most writers are fiercely generous people. They’re not afraid of the gray. They understand the weight of words. And they know how to stand in complexity without flinching.

All of this—watching my son find his place, while feeling myself drift from mine—has made me reflect on what it really means to belong. How deeply we’re wired for it. Evolution gave us that longing—because for our ancestors, to be cast out meant death. Our need for connection is ancient and deep. And while we no longer live in caves, our nervous systems haven’t evolved past the fear of being excluded. So we seek out safety in circles, in sameness, in the people who mirror back to us who we think we are.

But sometimes, that longing to belong gets distorted. It starts to look like conformity. Like groupthink. Like loyalty at the expense of truth. And in today’s hyperconnected world, where we engage more through screens than faces, the whole system grows more fragile. We lose the ability to see each other fully. Online, it's easy to reduce people to a single take. Easy to react instead of relate. Algorithms reward outrage. And slowly, we lose our tolerance for disagreement. We forget how to stay in relationship when things get hard.

The danger is that we start trading our authenticity for acceptance. We silence ourselves to stay inside the circle. But that’s not belonging. That’s performance.

There is a cost to speaking the truth. Sometimes it’s misunderstanding. Sometimes it’s distance. Sometimes it’s being labeled, misread, or dismissed. But silence has a cost too—and often, that cost is yourself. I can handle being excluded or called names. What I can’t survive is abandoning my own voice. That’s who I must be true to. And no one else can determine whether I’m in integrity but my own inner knowing.

Maybe part of growing up—of waking up—is learning when to speak and when to stay quiet. When to stay, and when to walk away. When to hold your ground, even if it means standing alone. Maybe the tent of belonging isn’t fixed. Maybe it’s meant to move and stretch as we evolve.

What I know is this: there has been no greater joy than watching my son discover a place of belonging in the world. And my deepest hope is that he keeps finding that—without ever shrinking himself to fit in. Without ever surrendering his truth to be accepted.

Because when a group demands you betray yourself to stay inside it, that’s not community. That’s control. That’s the beginning of a cult. And the cult of personality is real. I believe its rise—alongside the rise in polarization—is rooted in a crisis of identity. So many of us no longer know who we are, and so we look to the group, the influencer, an ideology to define us. To reflect us back to ourselves. To give us a feeling of wholeness.

So yes, I pray for my son to belong. But more than that, I pray he belongs to himself. That he surrounds himself not with sameness, but with difference—with people who challenge and expand him. That he trusts his own voice, even when it trembles. That he never trades his knowing for someone else’s comfort.

Because real belonging never asks you to become someone else. It simply asks you to be fully, bravely, and beautifully you.

My beautiful son at dinner, smiling with his teammates.