belonging – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Cheese Metal Belonging – Day 38

February 1, 2026February 1, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Inside jokes that felt like belonging.

Chris and I played baseball on the base league at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. He went to a private Catholic school in town, and sports leagues on base were one of the only organized ways we were able to spend time together outside of our South Side Trails adventures. When one of our baseball seasons ended, we decided to extend that sense of belonging and proximity into a new sport. Soccer. Oh Jesus. Soccer meant crossing over the tracks to the old base, where most of the officers’ kids lived because they made up the majority of the soccer teams.

Chris and I crossed over to the old side of base and brought our inside jokes with us as a talisman. They were not especially clever, and they were certainly not kind. They were observational. They were earned. We joked about the officers’ kids we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by. We joked about how they wore Umbro soccer shorts and we called them “UmmmBros”. We told jokes about how they listened to U2 as we listened to glam rock cheese metal, and how they carried themselves like they were already officers themselves. We called them snobs, but the joke was less about them and more about us. It was about noticing patterns and naming them together.

We were enlisted kids. That mattered. Officers’ kids lived on a different side of the base, quite literally and indeed metaphorically. They had better lawns, better clothes, better toys, better posture, and what appeared to be better confidence. At least that was how it looked from where we stood.

The jokes worked because we both saw what we were joking about. We were not inventing the distinction. We were recognizing it. Every time one of us made a crack about the “UmmmBros” or U2’s latest album, it was not really about taste in music, sports, or clothes. It was a shorthand. A nod. A way of saying, I see what you see. I live where you live.

That is what inside jokes do. They compress shared experience into something small enough to carry in a sentence. They let two people signal belonging without having to explain themselves with no footnotes or justification. It is just recognition. We needed that on our side of the base.

Those jokes were not inclusive. That was the point. They carved out a small, protected space where we did not have to translate ourselves. In a life built on impermanence and rank, that mattered more than I understood at the time. We were not laughing to exclude others. We were laughing to anchor ourselves.

I think now about how much of my childhood was spent learning which version of myself would be safest in which room. Inside jokes short-circuited that work. With Chris, I did not have to perform. I did not have to prove anything. The joke itself was the proof. If it landed, I belonged.

Years later, I understand that belonging does not require permanence. It requires recognition. It requires someone else noticing the same absurdities and letting you laugh about them without explanation. That kind of belonging is fragile, but it is real. It lives in memory. It survives distance.

I do not remember every joke. I remember the feeling of them…the ease, and relief. The sense that, for a moment, I was not alone in my noticing.

And maybe that is the quiet truth. Belonging does not always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up as laughter that would not make sense to anyone else. Sometimes it sounds like a joke about “UmmmBros” and “U2, but not you”. Sometimes it is simply the moment you realize someone else is standing beside you, seeing the same thing, and choosing to laugh instead of explain.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Borrowed Fire- Day 37

January 31, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A friend who pulled you toward trouble.

I have never had a true friend who pulled me toward trouble, but I did have a lot of trouble that pulled me toward people I called friends. In Plattsburgh, there was a kid who was more of a friend of a friend, or a friend of the group, a kid that drifted in and out of our orbit when he wanted. His name was Mike. He was short, quick to anger, and always looking for an edge to push. His dad was frequently gone on temporary assignments, and I never knew what his father’s job actually was. I only knew his absence hung in the air and created a lot of strain for Mike.

Mike’s height may have been part of his meanness, but the larger truth was that he lived inside a story that felt humiliating and painfully public. Even at thirteen, my group of friends knew what was happening at his house. Mike’s mother was finding her physical needs elsewhere when her husband was gone, and the worst part was not only that we knew, but that Mike knew we knew. That kind of knowledge does not sit quietly in a kid’s body. It turns into heat and rage. It turns into dare after dare. It turns into a need to control the narrative by burning it all down first.

Mike taught us all how to smoke. He taught us how to drink. We objectified women in magazines together in the South Side Trails. We were mean together. We keyed cars, put sugar in gas tanks, made prank calls, snuck into movies on base, shoplifted, and treated other people’s property like it was a joke we deserved to tell. When Mike was around, the meanness had a sharpness to it, like we were proving something. When he was not around, some of the same dumb choices still happened, but the cruelty did not have the same appetite. Mike did not just bring trouble with him. He brought a mood. He made all of us meaner than we were on our own.

The father situation was Mike’s issue, but it was also part of the wider tone on base. Plenty of fathers carried their own damage, and plenty of homes ran on alcohol, abuse, pornography, and the kind of quiet debauchery that never stayed as quiet as adults thought it did. Mike’s particular version of it was personal and specific. He believed someone else’s father was sleeping with his mother, and he believed everyone knew, and he lived inside that humiliation like it was a locked room he could not escape. So he pulled us down with him, and we went because we were young and because we were bored. We did not understand the difference between loyalty and participation. We were far too young to know how to pull someone up, and we were not yet brave enough to refuse the gravity.

Years later, I can see the shape of it more clearly. Trouble was never the point. Trouble was the language. Mike was trying to say, I am hurting, and I cannot stand being the only one who has to carry it. That does not excuse what we did, and it does not clean it up into something noble, but it does make the story more human.

What I hold now is this. I cannot go back and un-key the cars or un-make the cruelty, but I can tell the truth about how it happened. I can name the moment trouble stopped being thrilling and started being a warning. I can also be grateful that something in me eventually reached for a different kind of friend. Hope, I have learned, is not the denial of what I did or did not do. Hope is the decision to grow past it, and to recognize that pulling someone up sometimes starts with stepping out of the dark first.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Terms and Conditions – Day 35

January 29, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A falling-out that still sting.

Friends come and go. That has always been the deal. It was the quiet contract of the military, the rotating cast of names and addresses that followed me from place to place. College became the same kind of temporary, only dressed up in credit hours, retention rates, and being “mature” about it all. People arrived, people disappeared, and then people became a story told in passing.

After graduation, shortly following a quick stint as an accountant, Kari and I moved to Japan for a teaching job that came with a built-in expiration date. The contracts were one year, which allowed for a tidy little ending. The Japanese school system also had a way of enforcing impermanence. Teachers were moved around periodically, as though the goal was to prevent deep bonds from forming. It felt almost religious, like attachment itself was a rule that was not supposed to be broken. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, I was an expat with a small group of young, inexperienced teachers. We were all hungry for belonging, and we were far enough from home that the hunger got louder. We did life together in full. We carried the hard parts and the easy parts, and we laughed at the absurd parts that only make sense when daily life is built in a language that still feels borrowed. We became tight, not in a casual way, but in the way people do when they become each other’s lifeline in a foreign country.

It was beautiful. It was real. It was the kind of closeness that made ordinary days feel like a story worth keeping.

When we returned home, we tried to bring the bond with us. We talked about forming a team of four couples to go back to work as missionaries – whatever the fuck that meant! We met a few times to dream and map out a future that felt like a second chance at that Japan closeness. I let myself believe it could happen. I let myself imagine a circle that would hold.

There was a lunch get-together. Kari and I were not invited. Later, someone lied about it with the kind of polite, church-friendly dishonesty that is supposed to keep the peace while it quietly kills the truth. Eventually, one person came clean, and in that moment I remembered why I used to prefer transient relationships.

I had broken the rules. I had allowed myself to get close. I had allowed myself to love people, not as passing characters, but as anchors. I had trusted the story. I had trusted the holy language people use when they want to make ordinary friendship feel sanctioned and permanent.

Love hurts when it ends. This one stung because it was real. It was tied to some of the most beautiful years of my life, and it was wrapped in religion like a ribbon that also functioned as a blindfold. The pain was not the lunch. The pain was the realization that the bond had terms and conditions, and I had not been told what they were until I failed them. Even now, the sting still registers because the years were real. Japan was real. The laughter was real. The belonging was real. A single lunch betrayal cannot erase that, even if it tried.

Some friendships are seasonal. Some are sacred. Some are both, right up until they are not. I can grieve what ended without pretending it never mattered. I can hold the good years in one hand and the betrayal in the other and finally stop forcing them to cancel each other out.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

January 28, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

One Street Over – Day 33

January 27, 2026January 27, 2026 ljandkari1 Comment

Prompt – How did the friendship start?

For those who want the beginning context for today’s prompt, the first post about Jeremy can be found here.

My first real best friend was Jeremy. He was a Texan through and through, transplanted abruptly to Alaska. The shock showed on him, as this was his first military PCS ever. I arrived from California, where my family left March Air Force Base because of an incident I have only ever heard in fragments. The whole truth never mattered as we would have eventually left anyway. I had just finished second grade and knew almost nothing except that something had ended and something else had begun without my consent.

The drive up the ALCAN highway was relentless. When my family finally reached Elmendorf Air Force Base, there was no housing assignment waiting for us. We were placed in temporary living quarters for far too long. After weeks on the road with my family, traveling a half-paved road a thousand miles long in a U-Haul, the TLQ did not feel like home. The place felt heavy in ways I had never experienced before. And it got weird.

Colors in the TLQ would thin and deepen without warning, where color should have remained constant. Corners stayed cool while the center of rooms held warmth. The hallway carried a faint blue cast that no one else seemed to notice. Temperature changes brought memories with them. Grief lingered as anger did too. There were people there as well, not figures meant to frighten, but impressions. More like presences. I did not see them with my eyes alone. I felt them with my body. That kind of noticing is exhausting, especially for a child. I needed someone to help me carry it.

Jeremy showed up.

Beginnings and endings rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as coincidence or as a kid who happens to live one street over. At the time, it felt like luck. Looking back, it is clear that something essential was taking shape, something the universe wanted me to notice.

He had never moved before. Not once. His entire life had existed in one state until it did not. He was burdened with the newness of goodbyes and hellos. I was practiced in leaving. Somehow that made us fit, as we each had something to carry for the other.

That friendship did not begin because we were alike or because we chose one another with intention. It began because two children were standing inside unfamiliar spaces, each holding more than was reasonable for their age. Something in him recognized something in me, and the recognition was mutual.

I understand now that this is often how early friendships form. Not around joy, but around need. Around the quiet relief of not being alone with what is not yet understood. Long before we know how to tell our stories, we sense who might be able to hear them. That was the beginning. Not a single moment, but a shared breath, an inhale and exhale taken together, a small and steady proof that even in unfamiliar places, connection finds a way to form.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

The Accounting of the Siblings – Day 30 & 31

January 25, 2026January 27, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt (2) – Being chosen. Being ignored.

Home of the Highlanders, MacArthur High School was the clearest definition of an oxymoron I had encountered up to that point in my life. Highlanders in the Great Plains with a motto of “People First, Excellence Always” in a transient town better known for pawn shops and titty bars…Jesus Almighty! The contradiction was not subtle in the least.

When I arrived, I was immediately chosen. I was chosen not for anything I had done or earned, but for the size of my body. I am certain the coach believed he was offering affirmation, maybe even opportunity. He likely told himself a story about coaching me up and bringing discipline that would later open doors. What he actually did was place around my neck a weight that lasted the entire year, and much longer if I am honest. His choice was not about me. It was a projection of how I could be useful to him and his team. Utility masquerading as care has a particular heaviness to it. It presses down slowly on a proud chest and insists on gratitude while doing so.

I would have preferred to be ignored rather than bullied for an entire year for refusing his offer. That refusal marked me. It made me a problem instead of a resource in that space. Being ignored, however, also carries its own kind of damage. It teaches a collective disappearance as a survival strategy. It rewards silence and compliance and requires no accounting.

Being chosen and being ignored feel like opposites on paper, but they share the same origin story. They are siblings of a parental unit with an “idea of parental compassion is just, you know, wacko!” Both being ignored or chosen single a person out. Both carry judgment. Both demand something without ever asking who someone is.

In school, I was chosen in ways I never requested, and I was ignored in ways I did not deserve. From lessons I learned at home, I tried to stay small and as invisible as possible, yet chosen for a task I was not prepared to bear. Staying small felt safer than being evaluated. Invisibility felt preferable to becoming a symbol or a cautionary tale. I wanted neither attention nor erasure. That tension followed me for years. Over time, that same tension gave me eyes to see it later. It taught me how to notice patterns and to recognize when power was pretending to be neutral. It also pushed me to try to name what I was seeing, first quietly, then more openly, even when doing so came at a cost.

The cult classic movie The Breakfast Club offers one of the clearest examples of these siblings with a shared back story that I know. It is a film I used in class for years as an educator, not because it is perfect, but because it is honest about hierarchy and the siblings. John Bender, labeled the “criminal,” delivers a line to the “princess,” Claire, that sounds cheeky but is filled with lived experience. He says, “You could not ignore me if you tried, sweets.” It lands as swagger, but the truth inside it is heavy. John Bender knows exactly where he stands. The popular kids can pretend he does not matter, but they cannot erase him from the room. He takes up space in that place because disappearing has already been assigned to him elsewhere.

Bender is not chosen. He is tolerated by those who are there. He is watched. He is remembered only as a problem. The popular kids do not forget him because he is insignificant. Forgetting him allows them to keep their version of themselves intact. Remembering him would require reckoning. I recognized that math immediately! I learned early how to make myself unignorable without ever being chosen. There is a difference. Being seen is not the same as being held. Being loud is not the same as being safe. Like Bender, I understood that if I did not exert some control over my visibility, someone else would decide whether I vanished or became a spectacle.

Bender’s anger is never random. It is precise. It is armor. It is a refusal to disappear quietly for people who benefit from not having to see him. Later in the movie, he says what has been true all along. “What do you care what I think, anyway? I do not even count. I could disappear forever and it would not make any difference. I may as well not even exist at this school.” That is not defiance. It is once again accounting. He understands the math of the place better than anyone else in the room.

Claire believes she counts so much that her absence would register as a crisis. However, John’s absence would register as relief. He is visible enough to be punished and invisible enough to be disposable. That is the difference he names when he turns on her. It is not cruelty. It is clarity. He is not asking to be liked. He is asking to be recognized as existing and to be seen as worthy.

That scene stayed with me because I could relate to each of the siblings leaving the same residue.

What I learned much later is that choosing myself had to come before anyone else did. Not loudly. Not as performance. Not as rebuttal. Just steadily and quietly. Choosing myself meant staying present without auditioning. It meant letting some rooms misunderstand me, letting some people leave, and sometimes me leaving the room. It meant trusting that I was worthy. There is a particular peace that comes with no longer arguing with the ledger. I no longer need to prove that I count. I do not need to disappear to survive or accept a role that requires self-erasure to belong. That choice does not erase the past, but it does loosen the siblings grip on me. The brothers can continue their work elsewhere. I have already chosen a different inheritance.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory/Uncategorized

Husky Jean Calculus- Day 28

January 22, 2026January 28, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Trying to fit in.

Growing up, we never had enough money for the things everyone wanted. Back-to-school shopping was always tense because school supplies and clothes were expensive, and the margin was thin on a good month. My older siblings were teenagers, which meant shoes and clothes mattered in the unspoken social calculus of school. My mother, meanwhile, was running a different set of numbers, the kind tied to groceries, bills to be paid, and the quiet reality of coming up short and it all being her fault.

One afternoon in a store, my mother’s shoulders were tight as her attention was divided between price tags and possibility. She was doing the math in her head, calculations that did not resolve cleanly. I noticed, as I always noticed because I was old enough to see but I was far too young to understand what it actually was I was seeing.

So I erased myself. I said I would take whatever was cheapest. If it meant the not-cool clothes, that was fine or the cheaper Rose Art crayons, so be it. I said it lightly, as if it cost nothing, but I knew those words gave my mother a moment to breathe as I gasped for air. It was not that I wanted my siblings to have the best as I became a martyr, rather, I wanted peace in the house. Peace meant freedom from tension, freedom from eggshells. So I chose less and I told my eleven-year-old self that this is what being good looked like.

As I got older, I wanted to fit in everywhere. I wanted to fit in at home, at school, and inside my own skin. I wanted all of it without understanding that wanting everything at once comes with a cost. Somewhere along the way, I became exhausted, as my energy was limited. Survival required efficiency and a lot of energy.

I stopped caring about fitting in at school. Or at least I learned how to perform not caring about fitting in at school. This was not bravery. It was conservation. I redirected what little I had toward staying upright, toward “reading the room”, and toward becoming agreeable and invisible in equal measure. Endurance became my defining trait. I mistook it for identity and called it a personality.

The truth arrived later, quietly, the way truth tends to. I wanted to fit in, but what I really wanted was to belong. Belonging did not ask for performance. It did not require erasure to keep others comfortable. It allowed me to stay. I never had that in my first family.

Fitting in changes a person to earn acceptance. Belonging offers acceptance without negotiation. Fitting in hides real opinions. Belonging makes room for honesty with care. Fitting in depletes. Belonging restores. Fitting in is about how things appear. Belonging is about how things hold throughout the years.

I did not know any of this then. I only knew how to choose peace over cool, quiet over attention, and survival over style. The meaning of those choices took years to surface. Looking back now I see my erasure was not tenderness…it was twisted. But now, I finally belong and there is finally room for me to remain.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Square Pizza & Neutral Ground – Day 27

January 21, 2026January 22, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Lunchroom politics

Through the fifth grade, the lunchroom was neutral ground. It required only a basic understanding of a single-file line, eighty-five cents, and the know-how to choose wisely from the menu. The homemade square pizza made by Carol the Lunch Lady reigned supreme, folding in half but never breaking thanks to a level of grease that functioned as both flavor and structural support. The sloppy joe, held together by far more ketchup than beef, tested gravity and came in a respectable second, especially when paired with tater tots that counted as a vegetable because everyone agreed to pretend they were potatoes. Then there was the taco, which had never heard Spanish and knew no spice at all. Finished off with a carton of chocolate milk and the meal was complete. That was it. No strategy was required, nor was any understanding of complex human hierarchical structures necessary. The menu told everything that needed to be known.

Sixth grade changed the terms. The lunchroom acquired borders much like invisible fences that everyone pretended not to see while obeying their “Posted” notices perfectly. Rules appeared, not published ones, but learned ones. Seats were no longer neutral. Placement mattered, and choice was often an illusion, as belonging did the choosing long before anyone sat down. Jocks clustered loud and confident, already rehearsing for futures that assumed space. Band kids gathered with instrument cases leaned against their legs like shields. Nerds formed tight constellations around shared intelligence and inside jokes. Religious kids bowed their heads before eating, not so much for God as for each other. Floaters drifted from table to table, fluent in small talk and practiced exits. Loners learned how to sit with a book and make it look intentional.

The food did not change. The square pizza never left. What changed was the audience and, with it, the purpose. Lunch became a daily referendum on who was permitted to be seen together and who was better off unseen. Seats mattered. Laughter mattered more, because laughter signaled togetherness and safety. Silence could be read as arrogance or fear, depending on who was watching and what they needed it to mean that day. Some seats had to be earned, while others came with unspoken warnings to stay away. The politics were efficient and selectively cruel, enforced mostly through looks, although words were occasionally deployed when looks failed.

The lunchroom became my first real lesson in social cartography, a place that taught where power sat and where safety might be found if one looked closely enough. What I did not understand then was that everyone else was learning the same lesson at the same time, each of us convinced of being the only one studying the map so desperately. The tables felt permanent, the labels felt fixed, and the consequences felt endless.

Looking back now, the comedy of it all lands harder than the fear ever did. Grease-soaked pizza and ketchup-heavy sloppy joes were never really the point. The lunchroom was a training ground, rehearsing adult versions of conference rooms, waiting rooms, and dinner tables where the same invisible fences still exist. The difference is that, with time, the map becomes easier to read, and the borders begin to look less international and more domestic. That realization does not erase the lesson, but it does soften it, allowing the memory to sit where it belongs, alongside the chocolate milk and the understanding that belonging was always more fragile, and more negotiable, than it first appeared.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Typecast – Day 24

January 18, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A teacher who misunderstood you.

Some misunderstandings arrive loudly. Others settle in quietly and take up residence for a year.

I have always hated sports, especially the kinds tethered to institutions that claim to build character while quietly reinforcing outdated power systems. Organized athletics, particularly in schools, often function as rehearsals for outdated hierarchal power structures where bodies are ranked, obedience is rewarded, and aggression is sanctified. It is an impressive trick, really, dressing control up as virtue and calling it tradition.

The move from Plattsburgh, New York to Lawton, Oklahoma happened without ceremony. My father retired and received his ceremony, but the rest of us got Lawton. Plattsburgh had been a place of friendships, small freedoms, and the early shaping of who I thought I might become. Lawton felt like the opposite of aspiration. It sat flat and exposed, surrounded by land that did not soften itself for anyone. The Wichita Mountains loomed nearby, ancient and tired, as if they were retires and had already delivered their lessons and were content to watch the rest unfold without comment.

Everything about Lawton felt temporary. Fort Sill, an Army installation, fed it and drained it in the same breath. People arrived. People left. The town understood itself as a stopover, and that knowledge seeped into its schools, its rhythms, its expectations.

I arrived at MacArthur High School for tenth grade already out of place. I came from upstate New York into a culture where teenagers watched CMT, drove lifted trucks, wore boots like uniforms, and treated football as a civic religion. The worship of the pigskin was not casual. It was culture and religion.

At orientation, I went to pick up my schedule and tour the school. A coach saw me before anyone else did. He did not ask my name. He did not ask what I liked, what I read, or what I had already learned to survive. He saw my size and filled in the rest of the story himself. In his mind, I was already useful.

He wanted me on the field, blocking for a quarterback whose future everyone already knew would peak early and flatten out into something like selling roofs. The coach spoke with certainty, the way people do when they believe their imagination outranks your agency. He framed it as opportunity. He framed it as belonging. What he meant was ownership.

Why would I not want this, he assumed. Why would a body like mine not belong to him.

For weeks, he pursued me in the hallways with passing comments and encouragement that felt far more like pressure. Compliments came preloaded with expectations. Interest came with conditions. When it finally became clear that I cared far more about books than drills, words than whistles, his attention shifted. Not away. Sideways.

He did not apologize for misreading me. He did not correct himself. He simply adjusted the narrative so that my refusal became a flaw instead of a choice.

He spoke to his team.

For the next year, I was punished for refusing a role I had never auditioned for. The same boys who sat in church pews on Sunday spent the week reminding me that difference was not tolerated and would be corrected through cruelty. They bullied with the confidence of the absolved. It was cruelty wrapped in ritual, consequence-free and self-righteous. Repentance on Sunday. Retribution on Monday. A very efficient system.

What hurt most was not the bullying itself. It was the loss of sanctuary. School had always been the place where I could breathe, where the chaos of my family receded into the background. That year, even school became unsafe. The teacher who misunderstood me did not see that he had taken more than a season from me. He took the one place where I had believed misunderstanding might be corrected through learning.

Years later, I understand that his failure was not personal. It was structural. He was trained to see bodies as tools, not stories. He mistook size for allegiance, silence for agreement, and refusal for betrayal. He never learned to ask who a student was before deciding what they were for.

I learned something else entirely. Refusing a script can cost comfort. Teachers, when they misunderstand, can leave marks as lasting as those left by the ones who see you clearly. And some confuse authority with insight and never notice the difference.

Some misunderstandings pass. Others teach you exactly how carefully you will guard your interior life from that day forward. Hut Hut Hike!

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

All the Ingredients, Yet No Meal – Day 21

January 15, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What dinner time taught you about belonging.

Dinner was never about the table in my house. We rarely gathered around a full place setting of dishes spread around the table. By the time my siblings were gone and I had reached my formative years, the chairs stayed pushed in and unused, as if they were props from a different version of life. The table was not for meals, conversations, homework, or family meetings in my house. The table, like the house itself, was quiet, and quiet was something my family wore well.

The kitchen, however, told a different story.

Cooking was where my mother spoke, at least with me. She talked while her hands worked, as if movement unlocked language that stillness could not. She told stories while we rolled egg rolls together, her fingers moving with confidence and memory. While her chili simmered, she explained things that were never addressed directly, lessons tucked into technique and timing. She talked while I grated potatoes for breakfast, the raw metallic sound of the grater filling the room with a steady, unforgiving rhythm. That sound still lives in my memory, carrying both comfort and sadness in equal measure.

Those moments were where belonging happened because those moments were where actual communication briefly lived. I heard history while standing at the counter. She talked about Papa, her father, owning a restaurant and a bakery, and about growing up inside that world of work, responsibility, and food. She talked about my siblings when they were younger, sharing stories from before I arrived, memories I inherited without ever living. I learned who they were through her voice and through the rhythm of her hands as she cooked from memory. I learned where I might fit by listening carefully to places where I had not been.

I was allowed and encouraged to help. I added ingredients. I stirred pots. I rolled wrappers. I watched closely. Participation was welcomed in pieces, but the whole recipe of family was never quite assembled. We could gather parts and play our roles, but the finished pie never made it to the table.

That became the pattern.

Belonging, for me, was never about sitting down together. It was about proximity and presence. It was about standing nearby, being useful without being central, and being present without being required. Love arrived in fragments, measured in shared tasks and quiet moments in the kitchen. I learned that connection did not always look like unity. Sometimes it looked like parallel movement within the same small space.

Dinner taught me that families can function without ceremony and that care can exist without coordination. It taught me how to listen while working, how to receive stories instead of affection, and how to recognize that some people only know how to give when their hands are busy.

Even now, kitchens feel safer than tables. I trust the hum of preparation more than the stillness of unspoken expectation. And maybe that is not a flaw, but a beginning. Maybe belonging does not always ask us to sit down and face one another. Sometimes it simply asks us to stay close enough to hear the stories while something nourishing is still being made.

Tag: belonging