Let Me In.

On a trip last year I got engaged in a discussion about identity and the sense of belonging. My discussant, a young medical student of Indian descent.

Born in the UK, she confessed to feeling perpetually out of place. She shared with me that, during several visits to India, she experienced a sense of belonging she'd never found in her birth country. I questioned her to understand the root of this disconnect: Was it a race issue? Culture? Religion? Morality? What was it?

I usually have a pet peeve for privileged people and their proclivity for bogus humility and modesty. Occasionally quick to sling the hackneyed ‘all these privileges don’t matter, I’d rather have the short end of the stick’ response. But something about her disparagement felt genuine.

She went on to tell me about how differently she was made to feel as a child. She told me about her largely Indian settlement on the outskirts of London, which was her bastion. She utilised many words to express how outcast she felt. This conversation sparked a deeper inquiry into the elusive nature of 'home.' I previously labeled it, ‘mind in one place, heart in another’. An unwritten article at the far end of my mind’s desk.

So where do we call home? The poet Robert Frost once wrote, "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

She never got in, or better put, she was never 'taken in' by the British society. There is a figurative door, with a single knob on the inside, in which a foreigner like herself never enters. It’s easily missed too as the embellishments of contrived welcomes and documented faux citizenship can be diverting. It represents the subtle yet profound barriers that can exclude those perceived as ‘outsiders’.

In the past year I’ve come to understand what that means for someone of her circumstances. For people like myself, it’s partially inconsequential whatever the enticements or added privileges that lie beyond the door may offer, being in its environs is just enough. And why one may ask? The answer is simple? We have knowledge of what it is like on the other side. We, in actuality, have had a community of homes, and the one before us doesn’t leave much to imagination. But for the medical student, and others like her, that understanding is absent.

Psychiatrist Professor Michael Lehofer points out that people who suffer the most homesickness are, the ones that have the least bonding to a place, who don’t have a strong sense of a home. If you are bonded to a place or a people and have a strong idea of where home is, you will not get so homesick when you are away from it because you have the inner security and sense of that place that you take with you. You are free to explore.

I believe I was right as well, just because you share heritage with a sect doesn’t naturally make their abode your home. The letting in is the most pivotal aspect of the process. How devastatingly difficult it is to undo the erroneous imprints of a homestead as a home in the minds of a people, immigrants or indigenes.

What wedges our resistance to 'letting people in'? I have heard arguments ranging from fears of cultural dilution to identity loss. And then I think, but if all cultures and traditions, which are manmade, are constantly evolving, what we consider 'original' may simply be a past adaptation, that has persisted through time by conquest and enforcement.

Conversely, what if the culture we so much revere is an undiagnosed malady of an ancestral mind? What if our truest identity is our shared humanity?

Perhaps true belonging isn't about shared heritage, but shared humanity. Open the door, and let them in.