Finding our belonging in the unknown
A key coping strategy I use when I move countries is to try and make meaningful connections with people in my new community – not a new concept or groundbreaking by any means but I am with you if you are thinking that it is easier said than done!
Every time we moved back to a country, my mother always made us attend a different school. She has this notion that we should not go back to the same environment because we would have changed and every new school was an opportunity to not repeat the same mistakes, to try a different version of ourselves and to expand our identity. I guess she was facilitating her version of identity work long before I learnt of the concept and did a whole study in it!
It would have been so much easier to go back to our previous schools, reconnect with our friends and get back into our old routines. Instead, we had to make new friends, find new routines, learn new customs and create new norms. Like many teenagers, I wanted to stay comfortable because change could be aggravating but my fear of contradicting my mother was stronger than my fear of meeting new people! However, her pushing me into discomfort made me comfortable with the uncomfortable, which is virtually every TCK’s motto, as well as having a strong appreciation for community and developing a skill for creating my own community. Her insistence for me to navigate change turned into a coping strategy of mine.
As I moved in adulthood, this pursuit of expanding my identity and finding community became a priority, so that I had support and a touch point for understanding customs and practices of my new community. In university, this presented itself as befriending as many people in my dorm. In my career, this was done by friending as many people in my office. Moving to Wenatchee, I wanted to put this strategy into practice but because I am older, more self-aware, have a stronger grasp of my identity and I am more protective of my family, I chose to be more strategic in who I connected with and how I made connections.
Because I have had most of my life to hone this skill, I now truly believe that a massive asset of mine is creating community. It is core to everything I do and believe in, particularly with identity work and collective leadership development. In Wenatchee, I knew that I needed to make connections to settle into the community. One of the initiatives that I started is the Get Lit Book Club at our local pub. My husband and I befriended the owners, and they were looking for ways to boost their business and I thought beers and books go well together. But I wanted to make sure that conversation and connections were had, so I made it a monthly themed book club where we discuss books that we have read related to the theme, rather than being dictated by one book. That way, we get to and have been leaerning from one another and delve deeper into our interests and identities. Inadvertently, the core attendees were predominantly newcomers to Wenatchee who were looking for community as well.
I want to touch on this as well – the courage it takes to find your community in a new place. A common phrase that I keep hearing and completely agree with is that it is difficult to make friends as adults. We need to be confident in our interests and courageously search out a group that shares them and then introduce ourselves and find our space in that group. If our interests are not shared in the community, we need to bravely try something new to find our people. If moving was not hard enough, the psychological toll of putting yourself out there and actively finding your safety bubbles can be exhausting. And relationships take time to form, especially for a modicum of trust to develop, which means that you need to be open and willing to invest time into making the new relationships work and have faith that it will be a worthy investment.
As a multicultural woman, who is often an outsider in a community and because of my international lived experiences, I often hold a different perspective or approach to those around me, like starting the monthly Feminist Supper Club. Seeing the impact from hosting a peaceful celebratory rally in Memorial Park for International Women’s Day, where almost 300 people turned up (read more about it here), I realised that there were individuals who wanted to be part of a community where they were not an outsider. Hence, the birth of the monthly Feminist Supper Club. Our first gathering included women of colour who said that they struggled to find communities where they are not the only person of colour, we had women in inter-racial marriages who struggled to find others who could understand their relationships and so on. Although these initiatives are motivated by my selfish pursuit of finding my people in Wenatchee, it has created a lasting impact that I find is now simply part of who I am.
Finding and creating community takes effort, courage and vulnerability. It is tough to seek out your people as well as trying to create opportunities for people to come to you. It is, however, worth trying and being strategic. The flipside to trying to form relationships in a new place is having the ability to choose to end the connection if you can see that it is not going to be healthy nor respectful to you and your family. As our confidence in our identities expands, we can start to identify the connections that will be suitable and those that will be harmful to our wellbeing. Give yourself permission to avoid unhealthy connections and to continue pursuing nourishing ones.
So, if you are in a new place and trying to find your people, remember that you are not alone in this quest. Take that plunge and it will be so worth it when you find that one person that sees you and gets you, and makes your new place feel like home.
