What I mean by unrooted
and welcome to my substack!
This is the first time I’m writing something publicly online and I am scared. I have only a vague idea of the topic and target audience, but given that thinking about these things has had a paralyzing effect on starting, I should maybe figure it out as I go. Now that this new impulse to write something has hit me, I decided it might be more exciting to make it public (but anonymous in terms of being linked to my real name).
I decided to call my account unrooted because a lot of what I spend my time thinking about is how we are prevented from living a full life by feelings of not belonging, loneliness, the conditionality of being allowed to be. Uprooted is what happens when you get pulled out of a situation that gave you roots; unrooted - when you feel you never were rooted in the first place. Unrooted is kind of a life-wide imposter syndrome. Incidentally, for me unrooted is also how I would describe my geographical family origins*. Indeed, family is one of the types of community that can feed our roots, along with friendships, work, neighbourhoods, spiritual communities. I would like to give myself the freedom to write about whatever feels relevant at the time, but my tendency towards unrootedness will be always part of the background of these stories. The first topic I will explore is unemployment. I guess the feelings of belonging that my career did give me in the past would put this more in the category of uprooted – I used to be an academic researcher, until I got to the point that I couldn’t be one any more, so I got uprooted. Indeed the first few months of unemployment I did feel the grief of loss of something real and tangible. A real part of my identity that I gained from that career. However, as the unemployed months go on, the list of job rejections grows, I doubt more and more aspects of myself while also exploring career possibilities further and further afield - I forget the uprootedness and start to feel unrooted.
I am not aiming to gain a huge following, I don’t plan a paid subscription any time soon. Probably the most honest explanation of my goal right now is to use this writing to work through my own confusion. If someone might get something out of reading it, if I might find community through this writing, that would be a huge bonus. Finally, my intention is not for this blog to be all doom and gloom. Unrootedness sounds very sad and pathological, but I would like to investigate it so that we can see its influence on our lives more accurately, be mindful of it. Furthermore, becoming unrooted also gives you the mobility to move to new spaces, new circles, new ways of being. It doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.
* The concept of nationality is for me one way of feeling unrooted, but I will write about this from a very personal perspective. I will completely avoid politics.
Photo by Antonio Alcántara on Unsplash