Finding A Sense of Belonging through Finding Myself on the Playa

I have been writing various versions of this piece off and on for months - some of them stopped at a paragraph or two, and some were pages long. I haven’t posted any writing publicly in almost a year, despite many people encouraging me to do so. I think I wanted it to be the perfect story, even though Brene Brown taught me that perfection doesn’t exist and imperfection is a gift. So...here it is...my story of self-discovery and learning to love myself through a lot of inner work culminating with joining the burner community for the first time out on the playa this past summer. (Info about burning man here.)

Feelings of Isolation

Social distancing these past few weeks due to COVID-19 makes me aware of how many communities I typically interact with. I am very grateful for all of these communities and do not often step back and reflect on their positive impact on my day-to-day life. Being isolated at home also reminds me about the isolation I have felt at times while actively participating in groups, a feeling I have spent a lot of time the past few years trying to unpack in therapy and conversations with friends and family.
Anyone who knows me at all likely thinks of me as a social planner/organizer. Despite being involved in many groups and activities, I have spent a lot of time feeling like I didn’t belong. It wasn’t until the past few years that I experienced instances of feeling a true sense of belonging, and they were always relatively short-lived. I have been seeking the feeling of a deep sense of belonging for years. As an inclusion program manager at Intel, the term “sense of belonging” is frequently used as a stated goal for how we want employees to feel, but what does it actually mean? What does it actually feel like? I’m hoping I can shed some light on that here.

Sabbatical and Going Back to Work

About a month ago, I returned to work at Intel after taking a one-month paid sabbatical, a wonderful benefit that Intel offers its US employees. I am married to my partner of 12 years, and we typically travel together. He was in the process of applying for jobs after spending two years intensely working on his mental health, and I was on a journey of rediscovering my independence since attending my virgin burn in September, so I chose to spend most of my sabbatical traveling on my own, reconnecting with myself. I removed all social media apps from my phone before I left the country and did not reinstall them until after I returned to work. My sabbatical started with two weeks in Australia wandering around Sydney for a day, diving the Great Barrier Reef, and connecting with a close friend in Perth. I spent a week in Sunriver, Oregon skiing on Mt. Bachelor, doing yoga, and soaking in the McCredie Hot Springs, and I relaxed at home for my last week, ending my sabbatical with a day out on the pacific coast complete with a beautiful sunset.

I cannot possibly express how grateful I am for the timing of these adventures - I debated between February and March for some time, and had I scheduled this for only a month later, it would have all been cancelled. In fact, when I was departing Australia on February 13th, I snapped a picture of the airport board showing all flights to/from China as “cancelled.” Here are a few highlight pictures from my adventures:

Diving the Great Barrier Reef off the Coast of Cairns, Australia

Quokka on Rottnest Island off the Coast of Perth, Australia

View from the Top of Mt. Bachelor, Oregon, USA

Sunset at Hug Point in Arch Cape, Oregon, USA

My first week and a half back at work was much more difficult than I expected - I was in the middle of processing my thoughts from my time alone, and I struggled to focus on my work managing the inclusive leaders program at Intel. I was easily distracted by talking to colleagues about my adventures and wishing I was spending additional time sitting with myself - meditating, journaling, reflecting. Each day, I did the tasks that were urgent, read and responded to some emails, and left the office around 4 or 5pm feeling guilty for not putting in more hours and for not caring enough. I was disconnected from the actual impact of the work on individuals, simply seeing it as a list of tasks to complete. In that second week, a participant in inclusive leaders reached out with some negative feedback about their experience in the program. I immediately felt tense and then reminded myself what a gift it is to receive critical feedback, something I could actually use to improve the program, to make a greater positive impact on people’s lives. This person was so grateful for my kind response and willingness to take time to listen. I felt that spark again - the desire to pour energy into my work. March 10th was my first day back that I was able to get lost in the work, just before my colleagues and I started shifting to working remotely.

Digging Into My Depression

I first connected with my depression as an undergrad at Brown in Providence, RI. Everything was great on paper - I was attending college, doing well in my classes, enjoying what I was studying, playing Ultimate, participating in Jewish community through Hillel, and spending lots of time socializing. My partner (now spouse) spent a year and a half convincing me to go see a therapist. In March of 2010, a month into seeing my therapist in Providence, my parents separated. My therapy sessions between then and this past fall (2019), largely focused on processing the impacts of external events and people on my life: my parents’ divorce (2010-2011), my close friend Paige being killed while leading a cross-country cycling trip (2010), my dad’s illness and death (2015), and my partner’s depression/anxiety and unemployment (2016-2019). It wasn’t until this past fall after returning from the burn that I refocused my therapy sessions on my internal conflict and struggle. Within the past month since my sabbatical, I finally reconnected with that sense of depression that I had never really dove into back in college - a depression driven by deep shame about who I am.

Back in 2015, after taking a 10-week meditation and mindfulness course at Intel, I connected that feeling of depression in college with a lack of sense of belonging, but I did not take it a step further to realize that what was underneath it all was a lack of acceptance and love for myself, for who I am inside. I have always spent a lot of time seeking validation from other people, needing them to accept me first. The perspective of a single person has at times totally crushed me. This need for validation has hugely limited me from achieving my true potential, from being able to give back to the world in the ways I would like to. Time and energy that I spend seeking validation and feeling shameful about not being or knowing enough is time and energy taken away from caring for myself and putting my skills and ideas to work to make a positive impact on society.

The Playa and Feelings of Belonging

I can think of a number of specific moments when I felt a sense of belonging. The first one that always comes to mind is the day that my dad passed away, July 27th, 2015. One of my closest friends in Portland showed up at my house with a bag full of black clothing, knowing that I did not own any. I have a very colorful fashion sense, and sorting through the bag of black clothes I felt known and understood. My friend proceeded to allow me to keep the black dress that I wore to my dad’s funeral a week later, knowing that seeing it in my closet and wearing it from time to time would be a pleasant reminder of the imprint my father left on the world as a friend, father, leader, amateur musician, and physician.

A very different experience was this past summer on the first day of my first burn, August 25th, 2019, my 31st birthday. I biked around the playa in a pink and orange spandex onesie and had over 100 people I had never met sing me happy birthday in various different tunes throughout the day. I felt so celebrated and loved by this brand new community, and all I did was share that it was my birthday and my first time on the playa. I went to sleep that night at 5am with the thought: “these are my people!”

Celebrating my Birthday on the Playa

My first example is one specific person who knows me really well, but my second example is a large group of people who literally didn’t know me at all. This second experience made me reflect a lot on other groups throughout my life.

I’ve always been a member of a lot of groups/sports teams, but in most of them, I never truly felt like I belonged. I spent a lot of time blaming this on the other group members, not understanding why they didn’t like me, assuming that there must be something wrong with me. I had this idea that if I organized things for people and took on the role of being “the responsible one” then people would like me. In college, I served as a Vice President on the Hillel board, and I was close with my fellow board members, but I never felt connected to most of the other community members. There were people I looked up to who I always wished I could be- people who got lost in the spirituality of prayer and sang and danced like nobody was watching. What was stopping me from doing that myself? I now understand that I was missing a key component of connection - I was unable to be true to who I am and fully love all of me. I was too busy feeling not enough, trying to be the person I thought other people wanted me to be, waiting for them to validate me.

Loving myself for who I am and feeling like I belong are interconnected. I had been slowly learning parts of this lesson for years, but it fully crystallized by attending the burn this past year. I bought myself a ticket, and through reddit found an awesome camp of people who knew nothing about me and my organizational skills or my tendency to take care of everyone in order to be accepted. Typically, I spend time at group events ensuring everyone else is taken care of and largely ignoring my own experience. I showed up and was able to be free, to just be me, and to put my own needs and desires first. Over the course of my week on the playa, a week of many ups and downs, I learned that there were parts of myself I had been hiding from, afraid to face, afraid to even bring up to my therapist who I had been seeing at least once a week for almost five years. I was afraid to face my inner conflict, my inner uncertainty, my inner fears. Being in a space that simultaneously emphasizes radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, and radical inclusion showed me that it was okay to embrace all of those parts of me, to love myself fully as the person that I am without needing others to validate me.

Through my years long journey and the intense experience of being welcomed home into the burner community, I’ve learned that a deep sense of belonging comes from a combination of being fully accepted by others and fully accepting yourself; it’s impossible to disconnect the two, but finding one can help you find the other. Finding people and places where my true self is fully loved and accepted enabled me to fully love all of me. Loving and accepting myself enables me to feel that same sense of belonging in many other spaces because I am no longer waiting for others to validate me first.

Moving Forward

I post this now at this crazy time in the world and share that I am very much still a work in progress, as we all are. I am still working through my inner struggles, and I am still figuring out exactly what it is I want to do with the rest of my life, how I want to continue to give back to the world. I know that one of those ways is by writing, by sharing my story and what I have learned from my experiences. I know that another way is by continuously learning about others and their experiences and about my own privilege so that I can help build communities where others experience a sense of belonging.

I believe it’s important here to acknowledge many aspects of my societal and financial privilege. I am a white, cisgender women who identifies as queer and pansexual, but presents as heterosexual to most people. I have the means to access the therapists and experiences that led me to learn these things about myself. I am privileged that my insurance pays for and my job allows me to take time away from work for therapy sessions, and that I had both the time and financial means to attend burning man this year. I believe that therapy should be accessible to everyone, and I truly hope that one day it will be. I know there are a lot of efforts to make burning man accessible to all, and I hope to contribute to these efforts in the future.

Gratitude

Thank you to everyone who has accepted me fully and encouraged my personal growth. A particular thank you to the specific friends and family who held space for me and truly listened without judgement or trying to solve my problems for me - you know who you are! Thank you to all of the wonderful people who I know personally and who I feel I know personally, despite having never met you, who role-model true vulnerability and true acceptance of all of your imperfections - you show me time and time again that it is possible to accept all of myself and to feel that deep sense of belonging.

Thank you to the wonderful dusty bunnies of the Orphan Asylum camp who welcomed me to your community with love, support, and connection. You answered all of my pre-burn questions, literally helped me to set up my camp, challenged me, and created a space for me to learn so much about myself and my way of being in the world. I had never before felt so immediately accepted by a group of humans.

Rainbow Unicorn Onesie at Pink Heart Camp on the Playa