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Who Gets to Belong? A View from Literature

Reading Masud Husain's Our Brains, Our Selves alongside Rami Kaminski's The Gift of Not Belonging over the last couple of weeks, and they bring a fascinating tension to the concept of human belonging.

One is about people who lose the ability to belong when the brain changes and how quickly the world withdraws recognition when someone becomes unfamiliar. The other is about people who never felt the pull of the group in the first place and dares to call that a gift rather than a flaw.

Between Brontë's attic, Plath's bell jar, and Ishiguro's buttoned-up butler, literature has been asking this question for centuries: who gets to belong, who decides and why do some of us opt out.

Read this exploration on my latest Substack essay - link in bio or here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bibliotherapywithbijal/p/who-gets-to-belong-a-view-from-literature

Summer reading lists or the best books of the year have been popping up everywhere! And of course the novelty factor that they evoke, hooks readers’ curiosity. Popping up with the same bright insistence: beach reads, page-turners, summer thrillers, romantasy, self-improvement titles, books to pack, books to finish before the season ends, the summer reading challenges.

Today I wanted to devote space to the literature that some of us might need to restore ourselves from what has been an insane first half of the year. I know many of us have been feeling overwhelmed with the sheer pace of news, technology, AI and just how fast our world seems to be changing overnight.

In true bibliotherapeutic style, if I can call call it that, inspired by the third section of my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, titled “The Art of Literary Curation”, I invite you to be wholly intentional about what you read, focusing on what I call restorative reading. Reading that replenishes us, offering us a capacity to inhabit it: to stare at the sea, to eat peaches, to sleep for copious amounts of time at leisure, to find pleasure in the small things, to indulge in comedy. A reminder that the world is more than work, crisis, and obligation.

A restorative summer reading life

A restorative summer reading life begins with permission: permission to read intentionally; to read at our heart’s desire; to not finish; to reread; to choose a book because the sentences taste of salt, figs, or delicious childhood memories, that indulge us or comfort us like an ocean breeze on a warm summer’s day.

Books that Restore Our Sense of Play and Bring Joy

When we speak about transformation through reading, what exactly do we mean? The use of the word suggests a dramatic turning point, a before-and-after moment in which a life is visibly redirected. It could be a quiet, subtle internal shift, a new way of naming an experience, a change in how one understands the self or relates to others.

It may not always present as a visible change. It could simply be an alteration of the inner structures through which a person makes meaning.

My work explores reading as both a personal and structured practice, where reading serves as a tool for reflection and safe exploration of our emotions, particularly in moments of uncertainty, grief, transition, or self-doubt. I aim to create a space in which books become prompts for dialogue, self-inquiry, and emotional recognition.

We are living in an age of acceleration: acceleration of technology, of communication, of productivity, of consumption, and of attention. We are on an information treadmill, fed an unlimited diet of notifications, images, headlines, summaries, messages, comments and opinions. This often leaves very limited opportunity for reading and a deeper form of reading. The question, then becomes whether reading still has space to exist as a deep practice, or whether it too is becoming fragmented by the conditions of the world around it. At its shallowest, reading is the simple act of decoding words on a page. At its deepest,...

When we speak about transformation through reading, what exactly do we mean? The use of the word suggests a dramatic turning point, a before-and-after moment in which a life is visibly redirected. It could be a quiet, subtle internal shift, a new way of naming an experience, a change in how one understands the self or relates to others. It may not always present as a visible change. It could simply be an alteration of the inner structures through which a person makes meaning. My work explores reading as both a personal and structured practice, where reading serves as a...