Rachael Maddox spoke about acceptance vs. belonging in her Business Witchery Accelerator which I am currently part of and something twitched within me. or switched. maybe clicked. All I know is that something happened.

A realization descended upon me as the veil lifted. All the time, I’ve had both belonging and acceptance mixed up — and their threads, despite being very different in texture, were all tangled up in my being.

The short version:

Acceptance is conditional.
Belonging is intrinsic.

One thread feels like it’s been spun using an ancient spindle, cotton, wool or linen tended to with so much care: you spin, spin, spin as stories travel through the fabric of time and imprint their memory onto the emerging thread. That is belonging.

Acceptance, on the other hand, feels like a clinic, or an office with florescent light. A synthetic thread that’s been so efficiently spun by a machine. No stories. No words. Just the hum of the machine and the whisper of forbidden words spoken by workers too scared they’d get caught. Acceptance is sturdy and shiny. It’s like skyscrapers erect where small houses yellowed with age stood, no gardens, no big balconies.

Acceptance is the wide roads with speeding cars. Small streets that get quiet at night are belonging.

Acceptance is humans forcing their will on nature - or at least thinking that they are. Because you simply can’t and I learnt that in the desert the Spring I got pregnant with my daughter.

In 2022, I was in Siwa with my then husband and a few other people preparing to host 100+ people on a piece of land with a small number of buildings and limited amenities. We weren’t really prepared and the forecast wasn’t looking food. We tried to will the storm away, we tried to be cocky in the face of wind when we were in the middle of the desert. Needless to say, nature still had her way.

Now back to the original thread of this story.

Synthetic threads of acceptance involve fracking, extracting, mining and taking away from. They always make me feel like there’s more to do, more to be, like I’m not enough. Like this is never enough…

And sometimes, when there’s not enough humanity, when there’s not enough love…sometimes in the face of being dehumanized, neglected or harmed, we need to refuse. We need to not accept. But what we’re not accepting, I feel, is a behavior, we’re clarifying a standard, a boundary and a preferred way of being treated: honored, cherished, revered. This is where the conditionality comes — where it actually becomes a requirement.

Acceptance is always mining for your best behavior.

Within my family of origin, it feels like I’ve always stretch myself to belong (maybe even shrunk, too). I yearned for it, I desired it like a cat in heat. But it turns out, what I’ve been seeking was actually their acceptance.

My mother (who’s by now a celebrity around here) used to outcast me whenever I misbehaved. She would intentionally treat my sister better and with more care when she submitted to my mother’s constant demands of her. And I was discarded, it felt, I was kept outside that embrace, alone.

When I refused to apologize, my exile extended. I remember watching them from a distance. I remember watching other daughters being cared for by their mothers. I felt small. I felt alone.

If I didn’t behave, I didn’t belong.

But can you really take away belonging?

What I couldn’t understand was that I didn’t have acceptance. It’s not that my belonging was taken away from me, it was acceptance. And what my mother didn’t get was that they’re not one and the same.

Acceptance is temporary. It’s flat.
Belonging is a tapestry that’s woven relationally.

And because I couldn’t get that, I don’t have a relationship with my mother. I don’t belong.

Choice

Belonging requires reciprocal choice. And reciprocity isn’t a word I typically like. It’s not something I believe in across the board but, here, it becomes so fitting. I can choose a family but they’re not mine until they choose me back.

Rachael spoke about thinking you have belonging with someone — which, I believe, evolves relationally — when if fact you only have their acceptance — which evolves conditionally..

When you only have acceptance, it’s withdrawn as you evolve and circumstances change. It varies because it’s a one way street and often involves both hierarchy and power dynamics.

It’s been my experience that I could most easily identity whether what I had with someone was belonging or acceptance was whenever I needed support.

When what connects me to another is their acceptance, I’m often perceived as less than: weaker, poorer, slower…lower. And, depending on their education, people would either perceive helping me as:

• Enabling: and that’s if they are children of the white, modern, seemingly progressive, individualist institution. Here it’s frowned upon and completely ignored. Others who might offer help are often told off or advised not to. Simply because to each their own and I need to fend for myself.

• Problematic: and that’s if they are children of a seemingly backwards capitalistic or patriarchal institution that’s often “traditional” — here, they’d view the problem as theirs and as something that they need to find a solution for. They’d often delegate or ignore it until it goes away. But more often, it’s the subject of long phone calls with friends or family.

I’m not sure if there’s more I have to say about this. My guess is that there’s a lot more but right now my kids are requiring my attention. My son missed his school bus because I missed my alarm and my two year old is climbing up shelves trying to get something to play with. So I kind of need to end this abruptly and get them out of the house before I lose my mind.

But before I do (and I write this after having made sure my younger child is safe) I wanted to share that I’m offering a Holding Jar making class Saturday 14th of May at 6pm Cairo.

More about it here

We’ll be making jars to hold the weight of what we carry with us. And on the week after, we’ll be making Jars of Delight.

Next month, I’m finally offering the Not Yet Lab Live 6-week workshop because I realized I’m never going to be ready enough and I had to fully accept this. We’re starting on June 18th.