I Have Come to Replace Placelessness with Boundlessness
Belonging is something I have always struggled with as a multiracial person. Over time I have come to see the world, and how the world sees me, as a continuum, constantly growing. “I Have Come to Replace Placelessness with Boundlessness” traces the rewriting and shift of my own understanding of belonging (previously placeless) as I grow in self-awareness and observation of the world and myself (to understand being boundless), reaching acceptance of wholeness despite tensions in understanding and living the reality of complexity, in a world that demands simplicity.
I have come to replace placelessness with boundlessness.
I let words wrap my experience
because there’s no other way
to describe the sensation of belonging,
to many things but none—everything but one.
It is perhaps the largest paradox of being mixed race,
and existing in a place that demands singularity
when you exist in plurality.
When I travel far far away from home
I feel a sense of presence that is hard to describe.
Where people see who I am in this instant
and have no predisposed notion of me
nor demand questions from childhood curiosities,
I am simply me and I tell them with ease.
But then I laugh gently
because people still do not know where I am from
and sometimes it is not the typical conundrum
but instead deeper.
And sometimes it’s about nationality,
my eye shape, voice, pronunciation, melanin
or how my skin reacts to sunshine
or just the way I carry myself in the world.
I walk alone but surrounded,
and sit solemnly beneath tall trees,
while others sprint past me
sometimes staring unknowingly while whirling
too fast to look down or feel their feet
or see the magnificent tree.
I’ve come to link my sexuality with my ethnicity
and the ways in which I love so boundlessly and exist so freely,
rising and falling into my dimensions
in the many contexts in which I rise—like a buoy in the Mediterranean Sea.
I’ve come to replace feeling placeless with feeling boundless.
Se puede pertenecer a todo y simultáneamente tener un alma entera y plena, un ser complejo y completo, constantemente desarrollándose.
You can belong to everything while simultaneously having a soul that is whole and full, a complex being, constantly developing.
We constantly shift and move,
growing transient in time,
with people and places
we find ourselves able
to see ourselves
reflected,
refracted,
absorbed,
melting,
whole.
But I have come to leave frustration with a smile
when people do not know where I am from
because of my tongue
because of my face.
Because of my smile,
I have come to relish my ability to rise and fall
in spaces and connections with people
who do not desire to know where I am from—
any more than they desire to know who I am.
But since they cannot,
they come to see me
in the plurality that I am.
And this perhaps is the boundlessness I used to seek.
I know that I exist completely
in a fabric that continually unfurls as I grow,
and though pushed by the pins in the eyes and comments of others,
I never waiver from the center though it might seem so,
we bend like seaweed in the currents of our living.
I savor each moment,
the bitter, the sweet, the everything in between
as we witness our unfurling and return
to hold
wholeness.
Lenora Yee (she/her) is a poet, singer-songwriter, and multiracial overseas language educator. She finds deep meaning in creative community building and empowering youth in her communities, and in her deepening practice of yoga and meditation. Lenora helps hold space for weekly sits and contributes creative contemplations to the MRMG Blog and Slack community.