How Facing Your Unserving Beliefs Can Help You to ‘Belong’
Our need for belonging can drive us apart from one another, and it can also bring us closer together.
My relationships with my immediate family have always been the hardest ones to maintain. Correction – build. Even just building a trusting relationship with your parent or sibling is not a given and easy task just because we share blood.
I am someone who has felt like I was a bit of an outsider with my immediate and wider family. That sense of belonging has always been missing in my life until recently, and I know that part of my lack of belonging came from inside of me.
How I viewed the world.
How I viewed my career and others’ careers.
How I viewed my family.
How I viewed myself.
And how I viewed and managed that distance between my mum, dad, brother and me.
There were times in my life when I didn’t intentionally try to create distance, but I was emotionally compelled to.
We have all had that feeling? That innate internal drive, like a rush that signals something to us – usually steering us to do something that is unusual for us or really necessary for our survival.
My need to feel belonging was driving me to look outside of my family.
Being a Turkish kid at school, taunted with turkey noises… yes, yes… you know the drill… it was tough at times. Being 7,8 or 9 and dealing with various comments or strategies to keep you isolated can play tricks on your mind.
Or indeed, start to embed certain unserving beliefs.
And honestly, I have only started dealing with the fact that I have been a human who, for most of my life, was trying to get away from my heritage. It was like this permanent marker I couldn’t scrub off.
Being Turkish means I’m not like the other kids.
Being Turkish is going to limit my dreams.
Being Turkish means I can’t be who I want to be.
I was right. And I was wrong.
I am so fortunate to come from a loving family that would take me in, look after me at any moment. And yes, there were a lot of disagreements and even blow ups because the generational divide and outlook is so different between my parents and me.
Turkish 20-something single women do not go volunteering in Africa on their own! Now I completely understand their concerns… and I did make it there, but with fight in my heart.
So, my beliefs as 7,8,9-year-old-Mehibe were feeling true for me. Battling and battling at every hurdle to do something I wasn’t given implicit permission to do.
And I still remember being at university studying Law at UCL, surrounded by what I can only describe as a lot of privilege. And I remember some people describing me as ‘exotic’… that term was so alien to me. And I heard it later again when I married my very white, public schooled ex-husband – his friends thought I was ‘exotic’ too.
So it wasn’t all in my head – this lack of belonging, but what I did which fills me with regret and sadness, is that over the course of my life, even up until recently – I believed it. I believed I was alien, not the norm, limited – and so I had to fight.
But did I need to fight?
Did I need to over the course of my life step further and further away from my family? Distance is not just physical, but it’s also based in your mind, heart and motivations.
So after spending years and years of my life drawing myself away from my family and my Turkishness, I’ve started to take steps back to my family. With a stronger mindset, a fuller heart, and a lighter motivation I have my sticky glue gun out resealing bonds, one at a time.
I often ask myself – did I move to Barcelona to get physically away from my family? And after four years of being here I can put my hand on my heart and say no. I moved here purely based on what my heart yearned for – joy, laughter, sunshine, warmth, a simpler and more present way of living.
And ironically, of course, or perhaps it’s the most predictable part; that my journey is physically further, but I have never felt so closer in heart to my mum, and my brother. I’m still working on my dad – I fear my biggest supporter of my move still suffers from a broken heart of my lack of physical presence.
What have I learned? That even with all the prejudice in my life, I chose to move myself away from the tribe I was born into. And so I am filled with regret and sadness for time lost. But with all this regret, I have learned so much about who I am and who I want to be.
I feel a stronger sense of resilience having learnt from my regret – facing and processing all this sadness and guilt. I do feel guilty for my choices and behaviour, however I am learning to reframe that guilt into something positive and more serving for me and my family. What doesn’t break us makes us stronger. And so with one sticky glue blob at a time, I’m learning to rebond with my family whilst also rediscovering who I truly am and who I want to be.
