Moving Past Community Belonging

I'm a Third Culture Kid.  But these are usually made up of military/diplomat/missionary "brats" and global nomads, not one-time child immigrants.  

Ok, so I'm a child immigrant.  But immigrant communities are focused heavily on race and ethnicity, and as a "white ethnic", I'm seen for my skin color first, and white privilege and it's assumed twin - socioeconomic privilege - are assigned to me regardless of my actual lived experience.

Maybe I'm a weirdo on account of my autism, which was finally diagnosed when I was 43?  Except that I do not feel at all like I "found my tribe" among other autistics.  Ah!  It's because it turns out I'm also ADHD - ok, so AuDHD is my flavor of neurodivergence.  Except that there's something off....

Twice exceptional, as it turns out, confirmed (ish) in a roundabout way by having both my children tested and identified as gifted.  So then my quirks and challenges come from a cognitive profile that isn't frequently found among my peers.  Ok, that's what it is!

Except... my kids are "mildly" gifted.  Their evaluator swears up and down that "this counts" and that "they're in" (metaphorically speaking), yet the groups, books, and podcasts I turn to for community make it pretty clear that giftedness begins at a magical number that is just a little bit higher than my kids' numbers.  So we (because by extension, I include myself in the gifted category now due to recognition and ChatGPT correlation) aren't quite top notch brainiacs for the creme de la creme, but find ourselves adrift among more "typical" peers.

When forming our family, we turned to adoption.  But the traditional adoption routes proved not to be in the stars for us.  Instead, we found our children thanks to embryo "adoption" (donation).  Depending on a person's politics, we belong either with the adoption crowd, or with the donor conception crowd.  When you ask my children, they sort of have a foot in each. Yet another example of our destiny of living in duality.

And so it goes.  I'm white but my husband and children are not.  But none of us are Black. So just how privileged are we? 

I'm all kind of neurodivergent, but according to the medical model, these are invisible disabilities - disabilities not recognized by those around me.  So I'm expected to buck up and I feel gaslit at every turn, unsure of what a healthy boundary is, and what is an excuse I give myself on account of "my labels".

I was brought up Catholic (culturally anyway), but after a decades-long journey ending in a deconversion, I find myself in a spiritual no-one's land.  There are no groups that mesh with my understanding of the world at large, and the values by which I navigate life.  And after being mostly unchurched now for about a year, I find it hard to find the value in reengaging even in online Unitarian/Universalist circles.

My people must be fellow homeschoolers then.  Surely, we are such a small bunch.  Generally, we can see past the specifics of our chosen educational philosophies and methods and just come together around the fact that we customize and facilitate our own children's education, rather than delegating it to a school system.  Except so many homeschoolers do so on account of their religion, that it brings up a major disconnect.  And the secular ones are often pretty hardcore unschoolers, which on the surface would be fine, except this comes - more often than not - with "unparenting" - something my husband and I cannot get on board with.

And so here we are, a community of the four of us.  Belonging pretty much only to ourselves and each other.  The opportunity there is to belong also to one more realm - that of the human race... and in fact all creation as a whole.  But who do we talk to about that?  How do we make friends like that?  How will our children find life partners like that?

So we go back out there, into the general public if you will, and let go of expectations.  Let go of wanting to find cognitive peers, or kindred spirits, or people who get it.  We embrace being our own advocates, not relying on anyone else to get us in order to accommodate us.  We pick and choose and see people as individuals, not as members of their various identities.  And thus we are able to access unlikely friendships, fascinating world-views, and ironically, a way to be seen by seeing others - by recognizing others for their individuality, we start to move through life in the world also as individuals, not as labels, categories, or group members.  And then we vote accordingly, we donate accordingly, and we spend our time accordingly. 

People will want to pigeon-hole me so they don't have to do the hard work of actually getting to know me.  I don't have to let them do that.  I can stand my ground in the liminal space of "both/and" and insist on being seen for who I am, not for who they want to quickly judge me as being.

Perhaps that's the life lesson I'm here to learn - once I can respect each person as an individual, I can then come full circle to how we each together make up the Greater Consciousness.  Because only individuals can do that.  Stereotypes cannot.