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Winner, Books Are My Bag Award, Shortlisted – Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, Nominated Great Outdoors Award, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, Portico Prize The train stopped in Darlington and through the window I saw two policemen. One of them got in the carriage and recorded bodycam statements from the passengers. On the platform, I saw the man in handcuffs. He saw me and tried to point at me with a look of hatred. The ability to clearly communicate what you think and how you feel goes a long way toward helping you feel accepted and welcome. Not sure what to do about the nagging feeling that you don’t belong? This can be quite a hard issue to face and overcome by yourself. After all, there’s a good chance you don’t have anyone to talk to who might understand your feelings or be able to help. And don’t for one minute think that you’re sacrificing quality and results by opting for online therapy, because you’re not. You still get access to a fully qualified professional. It’s just more convenient and quite often more affordable too. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) What does it feel like to belong?
The other words are all variations on the theme of not belonging. What are the consequences of feeling like you don’t belong? A therapist can listen to you, ask questions to find the root causes of your feelings, and then provide specific advice to give you the best chance of finding that sense of belonging that you’re missing. We also have an element called Gamers Belong Here, which will see Olympians going head-to-head with high profile gamers on the official Tokyo 2020 Video Game, while My Story Belongs Here provides a special filter for people to use on their social posts to show that they belong here too.A profound read, weaving a sequence of immense concepts into a beautiful, unique and uplifting story about a walk. It’s also a superb study of the wildlife and wildness of the Pennines,and the words that northerners have found to name and describe them. Walkers may recognise many sights within Anita’s journey. But rarely has a writer brought so many strands of social and cultural history into the concept of walking.’
In April 1932 hundreds of people, mainly from Manchester and surrounding mill towns, marched up Kinder Scout in the Peak District as a way of protesting and proclaiming the right to access to nature and the countryside for all. This inspired Anita’s walk recounted in I Belong Here. As part of the commemorations of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass anniversary, Anita joined the Kinder in Colour event speaking at the opening rally before joining hundreds of people of colour to walk up the mountain. Free copies of I Belong Here were also distributed at the commemorative walk. Amid these reflections, observations and calls to action, the author basks in the quiet and solitude of the natural world, finding much-needed space away from the noise of the urban environment and the chatter inside her head. As Sethi makes her way across mountains, rivers and rugged limestone hills, her stamina grows, her resolve hardens and her confidence builds. Nature does not cure her anxiety, but she learns how it can bring relief and a sense of perspective that can be lost amid life’s day-to-day clamour. “Walking through such wild, ancient landscape brings a strong awareness of how we are all temporary guests on this earth,” she observes. “We will take nothing of it with us.” One woman's journey of reclamation through natural landscapes as she contemplates identity and womanhood, nature, place and belonging. I Belong Here is about inspiring a new generation with the belief that, no matter who they are or where they come from, they can find their place in the Olympic community.A brave and powerful book… I Belong Here is incredibly moving, uplifting, hopeful, clear-sighted and beautifully written.” Anita Sethi was travelling on a train when a fellow passenger who was playing music was asked to turn down the volume by the conductor. The passenger ignored the request, increasing the volume instead. As she could feel a migraine coming on, Anita asked him again to turn down the volume. His response this time was to direct a torrent of racist abuse at her for which, in due course, he was sentenced for having committed a racially motivated hate crime. Anita was severely traumatised by the events of that day. She was shown a lot of kindness by some of her fellow passengers and by the railway staff but others just turned away.
After I gave my statement to the police my anxiety grew as I waited to hear about how the man would plead. At the root of my problem with it, I think, is the fact that Anita Sethi is a journalist, and her writing ability does not stretch to a convincingly written longer book. As a ‘brown woman’ in England, she has been subjected to macro and micro aggressions her whole life, to the extent of feeling physically silenced for many years. Unfortunately, her authorial voice fails to do justice to the enormous racial disparities in our society, and her musings feel trite and laboured. So, for example, the grass she walks over is the earth’s green skin, prompting the thought that in nature it is easy to forget her brown skin. Walking across a bridge prompts thoughts about - you guessed it - building bridges across cultural divides. She eats a full English breakfast and considers that her identity as fully English is questioned. And so on, most repetitively and predictably. I am by no means negating the truth of what she says, but the way she makes her points sounds preachy, stilted and cliched. There are also slightly random info dumps which only have a tenuous relationship to the narrative and interrupt the flow. Her technique of taking a feature of the landscape and extrapolating an analogy with social phenomena, with a bit of research she’s carried out thrown in, rapidly becomes laboured and repetitive. When you feel you don’t belong anywhere, it can feel like a complete rejection of who you are because if nobody likes you for who you are or ‘gets’ you, it’s hard not to take it personally. You were born in Manchester but have spent much of your adult life living in London. How does it feel living in the south when you are from the north? The rather small parts of this book about her walk are combined with thoughts about her experience on the train, general racism, colonialism, but also psychotherapy by water and other natural phenomena, preservation of nature etc. etc. All these themes get a bit too much in this description, and are further augmented by explanations of certain words, plants, body parts, history, which everyone could easily have looked up.The simplest way to feel like you belong is to engage with people as much as possible. Get to know the people who are already in your life far better than you do now. Don’t assume that you and they are different – look for your similarities instead. Even if you don’t agree on everything, you will surely be able to find things on which your views are in alignment. Reading about her confidence and empowerment was so heartening, she is an utterly exceptional woman. I am truly so grateful I got to read her beautiful words. Her actions of solidarity towards fellow ethnic minorities and words of empowerment were so uplifting and moving. I realise my journey has been a quest for a sense of belonging. All my life, I felt like I didn’t belong and I grew used to that sense of unbelonging. But there comes a time to say: I belong here. I realise how much my anxiety throughout my life has been about my sense of place in the world. Since what happened on the train, I have developed a defiance to those who would have me disappear. “You may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise,” wrote Maya Angelou. I want to continue rising. My journey is far from over. I will not be silent. I will not stop walking through the world, my home. My one misgiving about this book was that sometimes I found the sentence structures clunky and it didn't flow well for me. I think it could have benefited from a stronger edit. The bumpiness I noticed, troubled my journey somewhat but didn't stop me moving along through an otherwise fascinating, moving and inspiring book. Good intention, but not very well written and overloaded with these signs of "knowledge". Though she as a Brit has studied history she doesn´t even know when the year of the three Kings was. I also thought that she was badly prepared for a such a long walk over days and weeks, f.e. concerning her shoes.
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