On claiming space and belonging

“So you’re a journalist.” No question. It was a statement. I was talking to a new friend at a party, and she asked about my job. She worked in radio, and was happy to find a kindred spirit.

“Well, I don’t really identify that way,” I countered.

She laughed. “But you work in journalism, and publish stories regularly.”

“Correct.”

“So,” she said, taking a breath, “I’m inclined to say that if it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck…”

“It might be a duck,” I finished.

“Right.”

This conversation is not uncommon in my life. Whenever someone calls me a journalist, I get uncomfortable. Whenever someone says I’m a writer, I get uncomfortable. Consequently, whenever someone asks me what I’m doing with my life, I respond with where I work instead of what I do there. And even then, I wonder how in the world I ended up there, and who even let me write on the internet to begin with.

And it’s not just my career that I qualify. My mother asked me how I became such a good writer, and I laughed before promptly telling her, I wasn’t all that good. I just wrote a lot of papers in college. Before I talk about the video games I love, I definitively state that, “I’m not really a gamer.”

There are subtle rules that govern the spaces of our lives, and when we don’t fit, it can be difficult to feel like we belong.

Belonging is about worth, about feeling like a space is ours to claim. I didn’t go to school to be a journalist, so can I still be one? I love games, but I’m not particularly good at them, and don’t play first person shooters, so am I still a gamer? I struggle to feel a sense of belonging within those spaces personally, but belonging is also at the center of debate raging across the country right now. Who belongs on which streets? Who belongs in our country? Who belongs on college campuses? Do people look at me, a queer person of color, and feel like I earned the right to be in this space?

It is a function of privilege to not worry about belonging, and instead to decide who gets to be in the club.

I will never forget my first year of college and the moment that I really questioned whether or not I belonged at my school. A branch of student government posted the results of a survey about diversity. They asked a question, “How can we increase diversity on campus?” Students responded (anonymously) on the paper throughout the week. One answer, by a student who rejected the survey’s premise, has never left me: “Why would we want to increase the amount of rape and crime on campus?”

In that moment, I was confronted with the reality that when some of my classmates looked at me, they saw someone of inferior worth, someone dangerous. They probably saw me as someone who received a “free ride,” who did not belong in that space. To be of color in many spaces is to face similar experiences.

And so the alternative is to remake these spaces, to rewrite the rules that allow for more people to claim that space as their own. To do this, however, we also must find the courage to claim our own space, to speak our truths, even if that comes in the face of challenge.

I’ll start.

I’m a writer, a gamer, and I suppose a journalist. I’m a Biracial American with a college degree, and I want a Ph.D. I’m a masculine of center woman who uses gender neutral pronouns.

What about you? What space do you claim?

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