A sense of belonging requires an understanding of one's past

'Put oneself in else's shoes', expecting that everyone have heard of this quote as it floats around the world and has been translated in almost every language, and it works! In this essay about belonging we are going discuss about how an understanding of one's past develop a sense of belonging. Without understanding what a person have gone through, either adaptation or fighting for acceptance we will never be able to understand how one can or cannot handle adjustment and we will not learn to appreciate our own present sense of family, place or society. The issues about belonging have been demonstrated and illustrated in a picture book 'My Place' by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins, and a related novel 'Looking For Alibrandi' by Melina Marchetta.

In the stories of 'My Place', the author demonstrate a series of young girls and boys telling different stories about their family. In the book, the kids would be talking about their background, family members, their neighbours and their activities. Each of the kids have history. Some of them have bigger family, some have smaller family, some lost one parent, some have a step parent and some have no family. Meanwhile in the novel 'Looking For Alibrandi' the author focused on a seventeen year old protagonist who is a typical teenager girl who struggle to build strong relationship with her family members. As Josie, the main protagonist, does not get along very well with her grandmother and her dad who has been missing all her life and just recently came back. Some of us today are not satisfied with what they have as a human, some would not even realise what they have, they then do not appreciate it until it's too late because they are not open up to understanding other people's history. ...

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...different society with different people, we feel different, we feel left out from others that then develop our sense of belonging of which group of people we belong to and learning to appreciate their existence. In conclusion, by looking at what each of the characters has to go through in their new environment, this develop our understanding on how to adapt to new environment and also understanding of our sense of belonging of where we belong in society.

To conclude, without an understand of one's past we would not be able appreciate what we have as a human. That includes the existing senses of family, place, and society of where we belong. The above has shown obvious that without getting deep into a person's history it is impossible to understand what they had to go through to be able to completely belong in one place as they say 'don't judge a book by its cover'.