Mohamed Hammoud​
​CLARITY

The Life You Once Wanted
​

When I first came to Canada, I wanted desperately to belong.

I wanted to belong in the classroom, on the playground, in the hallways, and eventually in whatever larger world I imagined existed beyond school. I was a boy who had arrived from Lebanon carrying an accent, a strange name, a different faith and, although I would not have had the language for it then, an acute awareness that I was not quite like the people around me.

At night, before I fell asleep, I sometimes imagined another version of myself. In that life, I was a star. I could sing. I could dance. I could act. I could walk into a room and people would notice me, not because I was different, but because I was extraordinary.

It seems childish now, because of course it was. But I no longer think those fantasies were really about fame.

I think they were about belonging.

And, in small ways, I got to live some of them. I performed in school plays and concerts. I danced at Friday night dances. There were moments when the awkwardness and watchfulness disappeared and I could simply let myself go. As I write in My Name Is Mohamed, “when the lights dimmed and the music rose at high school dances, something bold in me came alive.” For a few minutes, the boy who spent so much time wondering how others saw him stopped wondering. He stepped into the light.

But the lights always came back on.

That is an image I understand differently now.

The childhood fantasy eventually disappeared, but the desire underneath it did not. It simply grew up with me. The dream of being a star became something more respectable and much harder to recognize: a desire to be accepted, respected and validated.

I spent years trying to prove that I deserved my place.

Sometimes that meant proving that I was intelligent enough or accomplished enough. During my graduate studies in comparative literature, I could approach an essay or a discussion almost as though I were preparing a defence. I wanted not merely to make an argument, but to establish that I had a right to make it.

My Muslim identity carried its own version of that struggle. I often felt compelled to explain, defend or correct. Some of that was necessary. Prejudice is real, and belonging is not solely an internal problem that individuals can solve by thinking differently. Schools, workplaces, communities and societies have a responsibility to create spaces in which people are treated with dignity and allowed to participate without erasing themselves.

But there was another part of the struggle that took me much longer to see.

I had given other people too much authority over the question of whether I belonged.

Their approval could raise me. Their dismissal could diminish me. A compliment could reassure me, while a judgment could send me back into an old argument with myself. Beneath the accomplishments and confidence, there remained something of that boy on the playground, still watching the other children and wondering what he needed to become before someone would invite him in.

It was not until my fifties that I began to understand the flaw in the bargain.

I had spent much of my life looking outside myself for something no one outside me could permanently provide.

Acceptance from others matters. Recognition matters. Community matters. We are social beings, and it would be simplistic to pretend that belonging can be manufactured entirely from within.

But there is a form of belonging that has to precede all of that.

We have to become a place in which we ourselves can live.

For me, that meant no longer treating my name, my faith, my history or the experiences that formed me as evidence to be submitted for someone else's approval. It meant recognizing that another person's inability to understand me did not constitute a verdict on my worth. It meant learning that I could listen seriously to what others thought without surrendering to them the authority to tell me who I was.

That realization sits close to the heart of my memoir. But lately I have been thinking about it in a broader way, through something I have begun calling Living with Clarity.

Clarity, to me, is not certainty and it is not self-assurance. It begins with the willingness to examine what is actually driving us.

Some of the things we pursue as adults began as needs much earlier in life. Recognition can grow out of having once felt invisible. Achievement can become a way of answering an old doubt. Approval can masquerade as ambition. We can spend decades pursuing something without noticing that the original reason for wanting it has disappeared.

That does not make the pursuit false. It does mean it deserves examination.

One of the questions I find myself returning to is simple: What am I still trying to receive from the world that I have never learned to give myself?

For much of my life, my answer would have been belonging.

The life I once imagined was one in which I would finally become impressive enough, successful enough, articulate enough or accepted enough that no one could make me feel like an outsider again.

I no longer want that life.

Not because I have stopped caring about belonging, but because I understand it differently.

There will always be rooms in which we are welcomed and rooms in which we are not. There will be people who understand us and others who insist on reducing us to whatever is easiest for them to comprehend. We should continue working to make our communities more generous, equitable and humane.

But none of those rooms can become home if we arrive in them believing that someone else must first give us permission to belong.

Perhaps that is part of what it means to outgrow a dream. We do not always abandon what we were searching for.

Sometimes we finally understand what we were really searching for.

And then we learn how to find some of it within.