![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Although we had never talked or otherwise acknowledged each other’s existence in the two years of sharing a campus, we suddenly felt that we belonged to the same tribe, united along this slim axis of affiliation as we faced a shared Other in the municipal bureaucrats and surrounding strangers.Īs philosopher David Whyte aptly observed, “our sense of slight woundedness around not belonging is actually one of our core competencies.” “It takes a lot to wrest identity out of nothing,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their extraordinary conversation on identity and belonging, and yet wrest we do when we must: The boy and I locked eyes in relieved recognition of affinity amid alienating otherness. Across the mass of dejected strangers, resigned to countless hours at the mercilessness of bureaucrats, I spotted a boy from my high school. One Friday morning, I stepped into a municipal office to apply for the coveted certificate of identity and lined up behind - or, rather, herded with, as is customary in Eastern Europe - a large lot of my fellow humans also in need of some government document. ![]() But this long-awaited event also marked my first brush with the violence of bureaucracy. As a teenager in Bulgaria, the great joy of turning sixteen was finally qualifying for a passport. ![]()
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