Around this time of year, I sink into a period of melancholy. I didn’t notice it right away because of the beautiful spring weather that marked the last ten days here in Seattle. But as the rays of sunlight slip behind a cool, damp cloud cover, I feel it’s familiar tug. April is the middle of a beginning – the moment we take a breath, the second chapter of the year. It’s a reevaluation period, a place where we remember what it was like, and who we were, before. I am constantly leaving myself behind as I become who I am going to be. Necessarily, this involves leaving other people behind in the process. Sad, and inevitable.

My melancholy is also touched by beauty. April brings people up and out of the basement of winter. It invites compassion and curiosity. I remember what it is like to reach my fingertips towards people, not because I need them, but because I want them. I have more tolerance, and more grace. My capacity to forgive swells. I resent this sometimes because it makes me more open to hurt. The things I have numbed out? No longer. I cry more in April. 

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the day I launched The Olly Project. The beginning of the fourth year - 4! Like my dad likes to say, I have been gathering material to write about all my life. This is one of the places that the material gathers. I grew quieter here this year, sitting and savoring instead of thinking and typing. But I have always been here. My body always remembers this anniversary. It marks something very special for me. And even when I was unable to write here for the fear of what might come out if I did, I loved and left traces of me all over the world. 

Every time I connect to an idea, it pops up everywhere. In books, articles, videos, conversations, jokes, movies, phone calls, and doodles. I write about it in paragraphs, press it into my skin, hum it under my breath as I walk. What comes up for me always comes out, because it is too much existential pressure to keep it inside. This year, I have been researching and studying belonging, well-being, sensory experiences of touch, body mysteries, knowledge production, social organization, and relationships to place. When I say research and study, I mean in school, but also at home, in my relationships, and the environment. I wonder about things that do not exist in isolation, especially in my world. Everything is connected. The moment I think I might have an answer, another question arises. This, I know, is how I am meant to live. Connecting one phenomenon to another. Drawing lines from individual to communal. I ask, what brings us to each other? What is coming together in these moments? Where do I belong? 

I just finished the third and final focus group of a research series that I am conducting about our sense of touch as it might connect to belonging. To be more precise: I am conducting a sensory ethnography as the final research cornerstone of my undergraduate career. It has been an incredible practice in relationship building, co-creation, and qualitative analysis. I love being a researcher, especially in ways that challenge homogenous, dominant ways of knowing. But, I digress.

A participant said this today: “If we listen carefully enough, we all belong.” And another, “Touch acknowledges my physical existence. It reminds me I am alive, and the limitations of my body. Where I end.”  

In discussing and defining belonging, we must also consider its opposite: Where don’t I belong? Our conclusion, drawn together: Wherever my body is not. 

Otherwise written as, I belong wherever my body is. 

I belong wherever my body is.

What a beautiful thought. The sensual relationships we have with ourselves (sensual as literally defined, connected to the senses) implicates our permission to feel. How deeply we give ourselves permission to feel impacts how much we are in our bodies. And how much we are in or out of our bodies is simultaenously tied up in our sense of belonging.   

Notice the linguistics: a sense of belonging. By studying the sense of touch, I encountered another type of affective, intuitive sense scaffolded within the five primordial Western senses. A lightbulb! Eureka! This is something I have longed to put words to, an intuition that I have never been able to materialize until today. Another way of knowing. Another way of sensing. There is more.

We are a communal people, who seek out friendship, family, love, and sex. We suffer. We die. We are the existential patients of our own experiences. We care and are cared for. We love and are loved. And throughout our lives, another constant: we are all searching for a sense of belonging. But we have been thinking about this sense of belonging as an outcome, as an end, as an arrival point where unto we might finally feel at peace, as the final point on the timeline. Sometimes people change jobs, get married, move, leave relationships, and give their energy away in the hopes of finding a sense of belonging. I’d hazard a guess that it is the driving force behind many of the things that we change about ourselves. 

Sometimes it changes the things we love most.

Yet! This is not a death sentence. There is more! More - one of my favorite words, indicating abundance, life, discovery. We may never have to look further than our sensual embodied knowing in order to access our sense of belonging. It is not an outcome. It is a holy feeling that we must follow: I belong wherever my body is. Our body narrative is compounded through our senses. And in these conversations, reflections, and connections, I stumbled upon an entirely distinct yet entangled sense – belonging.

If you’ve read all that and have more questions than I have answered, please know that I have not officially written up my findings yet. I’m still coding and theorizing about the data I gathered. Then, I will bring back my tentative conclusions to the research participants and we will discuss them together, changing, editing, and finalizing as a collective. So don’t worry! It is purposefully unfinished. But, what I wrote above is the result of an intuitive phenomenological wandering into a world I did (do) not fully understand. It is a conclusion, of sorts. A discovery. A new piece of common ground from which we can build further. If you’re interested in reading my research paper upon its completion, let me know!

A mark of good research is that it leaves you with more questions than answers, and I feel that fully in this space. Indeed, as I write this, I know this is a sliding door moment. There is no way to go back to who I was before this year, this month, this instant. The trajectory is forever altered. Remember? I cry more in April. 

When I was younger, I remember my mom walking through the airport wearing a t-shirt that read, Not All Who Wander Are Lost. I am thankful to the me that dared to write something worth sharing. As I grow up and out of this time of my life, I am surprised by how un-lost I feel. I am wandering. I do not know the next steps except the one in front of me. And, I believe fiercely that I will encounter the next right thing, if only I am brave enough to try. 

Thank you for loving me and The Olly Project over the last three years. I am reminded every day why I made this choice. How I could have made no other choice.

“Every personal history is first a history of the skin.” -David LeBreton