On Belonging Without a Baseline
From the moment I had a sense of myself, I felt like something was missing. I was a curious child, always looking for something — though I didn’t have a name for it yet. I think now I was looking for connection.
Time with cousins and aunts had a pull to it — the small rituals we did together, meals at my grandmother’s table. Those moments felt close to something. But underneath it, quietly, in the background, I always felt different from my cousins, even sitting at the same table, eating the same food. I didn’t have language for why. I do now: adoption meant I started without the connection they’d had from birth, and without their unbroken thread to a mother.
What Belonging Actually Is
I’ve had to define belonging for myself, mostly by figuring out what was missing. Here’s what I’ve landed on. Belonging is:
- Being unguarded — not performing, not managing an impression, not bracing for judgment. Just present.
- Being missed, not just for what you contribute. Noticed in your absence, not only in your output.
- Continuity — not one good conversation, but the sense the connection will still be there next week, next month.
- Something the body knows before the mind names it — an exhale, shoulders dropping, a hum of vigilance you didn’t realize you were carrying, gone.
- Not constant. It comes and goes, even in real belonging — it can hold friction, distance, even conflict, and still be belonging, as long as the underlying thread isn’t actually broken.
The Body Knows Before the Mind Does
I feel that exhale with family or friends — sitting with them, knowing they aren’t going to judge me. But even there, I catch myself scanning for rejection. There’s a default hum underneath: when will they finally have had enough of me? Do they even want me here?
What quiets it isn’t reassurance — it’s being needed. When they ask about my life, when I can contribute something back, I stop feeling like I’m in the way. I’ve started to notice why: if belonging was never something I could just trust, contribution became the evidence instead. Being needed is legible in a way that being wanted, for no reason at all, never quite got the chance to be.
That feels like the adoption wound talking. But I don’t always know which is true: that I don’t feel belonging because I don’t trust it yet, or that something is legitimately, actually missing.
I’ve noticed this same ache watching shows about Indigenous people and communities — something in the way they describe a missing piece, a severed connection to people and land, that I recognize in myself. Not the same history, not the same loss, but something in the shape of it feels familiar.
Searching for a Baseline I Never Had
I don’t think I’ve ever quite found what I was looking for. Belonging isn’t something I can point to and say “there, that’s it” — it’s pieced together from fragments, moments where something didn’t feel absent for once, and I try to remember what was different about them.
Newfoundland comes close. So does reconnecting with family with shared values. I couldn’t tell you exactly what makes those two things land differently than everywhere else I’ve looked — only that something in them doesn’t have the hum underneath it, or has less of it.
This Isn’t a Flaw — It’s a Reasonable Outcome
If you were adopted, and you’re just now realizing you never got that baseline — that’s normal. It isn’t a flaw, and it isn’t something you did wrong. It’s a reasonable outcome of what actually happened to you.
What’s helped me is reminding myself, on purpose, what belonging actually is. It’s being with safe people who don’t judge. It’s showing up as yourself without having to prove anything. It’s knowing you’re welcome even when others have different interests, different experiences, different histories than yours. It’s shared values — being around people who care about what you care about, who care about what you do. Belonging is being with people who make space for you, not people you have to make yourself small or useful to earn space from.
And if you live somewhere you don’t feel connected to the land, you can still look for connection in other ways — in people, in shared values, in the things you build together. That search is real, and it matters, even when it’s slow.
The Grief Underneath the Practice
But I want to be honest about something too: there is a real void when you don’t grow up with your family of origin, and no amount of reminding myself what belonging is fully closes it. I think about Newfoundland often — the worn paths through trees down to rocky cliffs, seagulls crying over the water, boats rolling into port while I drank my coffee. A place where people from other countries were welcomed and engaged, not treated as strangers. There was a quiet knowing there I still can’t put into words — something that whispered this is where your heart is. I felt it with distant cousins too, a knowing I don’t fully understand myself.
What I grieve most isn’t a face that looks like mine or an origin story I don’t have. It’s not being understood — the way I process the world, curious instead of closed-minded, drawn to people who are different, caring about people who get looked down on for it. That part of me was rarely met as a child. Practicing belonging now, in the relationships available to me today, is real and it helps. But it’s its own thing, running alongside the loss — not a replacement for it.
When the Old Feeling Still Shows Up
This still shows up now. In a conversation recently, the topic was something I didn’t have much experience with, and I felt excluded — on the outside of it. But when I wasn’t participating, they asked about my own experiences instead. They included me. They tried.
And still, something in me registered the moment as evidence I don’t belong. I remember thinking, here it is again — that feeling. Noticing it didn’t necessarily help. It can feel like it will never change, even while you’re watching it happen and can name exactly what it is.
The room wasn’t withdrawing. It was doing the opposite — noticing I’d gone quiet, and reaching toward me instead of away. What surfaced wasn’t about that room at all. It was an old, familiar awkwardness arriving first and coloring everything after, so that the actual evidence of belonging — the reaching, the asking — almost didn’t get taken in.
Sometimes I don’t realize what’s happening in the moment. It’s only afterward — writing this, sitting with it — that I can see the pattern clearly enough to name it.
What’s helped, slowly, isn’t a single insight. It’s practicing belonging on purpose instead of waiting to feel it — letting what actually happened count as evidence, even when it doesn’t feel like enough yet. Separating the old feeling from the verdict it wants to hand down. Not one realization, but repetition, until something in me starts to update.
If you don’t feel like you belong, that doesn’t mean you don’t. It might mean you’re experiencing belonging the way everyone else does — you just don’t have the baseline to recognize it by, so you question it instead of trust it.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this. I’m still practicing. Still catching the old feeling mid-sentence and trying to let the evidence in anyway. That’s not a failure — it’s what it actually looks like to build a baseline you were never given at the start.
Questions to Sit With
- What’s the earliest moment you can remember feeling like something was missing — even if you couldn’t name it at the time?
- Who or where has come closest to feeling like belonging for you? What made it different?
- The next time that old feeling surfaces, can you name it out loud, even just to yourself, and separate it from the verdict it wants to hand you?
If This Resonates
If any of this sounds like your own story, you don’t have to work through it alone. I offer trauma-informed peer support for adults navigating adoption, religious trauma, and belonging wounds — reach out if you’d like to talk – loriwilliamsliminalspace@gmail.com.
A few resources that speak directly to this:
- The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, by Nancy Verrier
- Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton
- Adoptees On podcast