On Belonging:

The Power of One

We all want to belong. We want to be accepted. Included.

I’ve struggled to belong. In my formative teen years in junior high school, I was sick. I looked sick. I wore a floppy white hat to cover my chemo bald head. And I was the principal’s son.

In high school, I struggled. I still didn’t belong. My friends were dating and going steady and holding hands and making out after school. I was trying to stay healthy between weekly chemo treatments. It wasn’t easy.

I discovered I belonged in the gym. I loved the smell of the gym on a cold Friday night as the Bulldogs battled on the basketball court. I couldn’t play, but I could keep stats. So that’s what I did.

In college I started to feel included. It helped my brother was a senior when I was a freshman. I had built-in friends. But I didn’t belong. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t belong. I was at an elite liberal arts college populated by prep-school graduates and trust-fund babies. I was neither. Add in my insecurities with women and my rather bucolic upbringing, and I was different. I was excluded. But I excluded myself. I just didn’t feel like I fit in. I was adrift, and struggling with the high-school-to-college transition.

As I started my professional career, I started to strut. I had a confidence borne of no more chemo, no more threat of death.

At UVM, I started from scratch. I knew no one. I wasn’t a Vermonter. I didn’t belong. But I just put my head down, trusting that I would one day belong. And I did. I started to gain the trust of the coaches and the athletes. I worked hard. And just as I was trying to fit in, an inclusive legendary coach included me in an after-hours gathering at the Roto, a local watering hole. This coach included me in conversations, clued me in to personalities, when he had no reason to. What a difference it made. One person changed my reality.

As I felt more secure, my empathy grew for those who weren’t accepted. I hired a bright young man named Tyler as an assistant in my office. He is in a wheelchair, so it was no easy feat getting him up into one of the press boxes at the Gut. But I would ask players who weren’t playing that night to carry him up the steep stairs. One night Patrick Sharp, back from the NHL, carried him up the stairs. I thought Tyler would float right out of the field house. I had the box renovated so Tyler could see the action better.

In a life when he was rarely included, where he rarely belonged, Tyler belonged in that press box. He chatted up the players. The assistant coaches treated him like another assistant coach. His stats were spot-on. He belonged.

Later, there was a women’s basketball player who was a marvel. Smooth and ridiculously talented on the court, she was still trying to belong off of it. She was the picture of confidence. The best player in the conference. The smoothest Catamount ever. But she struggled to belong.
I had no idea at the time, of course. She put up a good front. But it turns out she always struggled to belong. She was different, her light black skin and runway model beauty belying inner angst.

I liked her. We connected. I don’t know if she was drawn to me, or if I was drawn to her, but we connected. We shared clementines at the press table during pre-game warmups.

Years later, we reconnected during the pandemic. Today she is one of my best friends. I live in a meadow on a river in the Adirondack Park. She lives in a redwood forest in northern California. It doesn’t matter.

I still struggle with belonging. I suspect she does too. But together, we belong. She gets me. I get her. She trusts me. I trust her. It’s nice. It’s comfortable. It’s genuine.

I guess all it takes is one person to make you feel like you belong. And, sometimes, that’s enough.