Bones of our Belonging By Annahid Dashtgard

Bones of our Belonging

By Annahid Dashtgard

I started writing Bones of Belonging just after Covid-19 hit us and finished as we began transitioning into a new “post-pandemic” normal. This timing was coincidental but also significant, as the pandemic became a mirror reflecting and accentuating massive gaps in access to health care, mental health support, physical safety, and opportunity based on little more than the color of one’s skin. When the murder of George Floyd saw the United States, Canada, and other nations shatter along the fault lines of systemic racism, many workplaces, organizations, and communities were no longer just looking in the mirror — they were left holding the broken pieces with no idea how to put them back together.  

Like many individuals, I too was left holding broken pieces with no idea how to put them back together. I was in the middle of a home renovation and renting a cottage hours outside of the city, struggling to translate our in-person consulting services to the online world and managing our two unruly children fulltime (reducing available work hours to a fraction what they were before).  Early in the pandemic my lower back gave out- a new and unexpected injury which I describe in the first story in the book, “Silver Birch”:

The next morning I can’t get out of bed. My lower back muscles have seized, and I can’t move unless bent over double at the waist, shuffling forward like a giant mutant crab. I feel closer to a hundred than to fifty, and I fear that if I move too abruptly I will dislocate my own backbone. What we are not told when thrust into the liminal space of transformation between whatever state of normal governed our lives and whatever the future will bring, is how excruciating the process can be. We’re not forewarned about how we will be broken, how we will eventually be asked to surrender pieces of our past selves on the altar of the future.

As a writer, words are my medicine, so I turned to words as the glue to re-arrange and make meaning of all the newly fragmented pieces.   Stories are the bones of our belonging, I remember thinking, and so I started this book’s journey deciding to write a series of personal stories related to different themes of belonging- to the land, in a marriage, in our own skin—as a roadmap leading the way out of despair, hoping it would also offer the same to others. 

I also wanted to make meaning as a Brown woman, writing from a perspective I was missing while growing up. As a GenX woman, I came of age through the stories of other women, all white women. I would read these books, often late at night, as validation for what I was starting to experience as a young woman in what was still very much a man’s world. I learned it was okay to be angry, to look for ways to be connected to my body, to acknowledge the need for spirituality. I found ways back to myself through their words, but I never was able to touch the core wounding… to acknowledge the impact of being a racial outsider. Where were the stories—ANY stories—sharing meaning from everyday life experiences in Brown skin, in an immigrant body, in a Brown immigrant female body?  

Every couple of months from March 2020 to December 2022 I would write a new story.  As I moved through a number of transitions — moving back into our house, restructuring our business, getting our kids back to school and then home and back again—I would deal with moments of daily overwhelm (many of them!) by weaving words in my head.  I read somewhere that 90% of writing is thinking– and that’s so true!  It was like having a creative room in my head I could escape to at any time which was so necessary for me.  I didn’t realize how necessary until I was diagnosed with ADHD halfway through the pandemic—the mental focal point of the book held me through a lot of the chaos.

This book, my second, also helped me nail down my writing voice and to trust that when the story was ready, the words would emerge. I’ve never been one of those writers who can sit and write everyday at the same time for the same length of time.  In fact, if I force myself to write my words come out as flat as a pancake.  I seem to only be able to write when it’s connected to meaning– it spurts out when it’s ready and then I scramble to make time to catch it. As my husband says in the book “when you write it’s like your soul meets the page”.  This feels true for me.  People sometimes ask how I possibly make time in the midst of running a business and having two active kids but for me the writing is what makes the rest of the time both bearable and meaningful.  Writing is my lifeline to purpose. 

I’ll finish by saying that fostering a world where everyone matters and belongs requires

an awakening of the heart space, an extension of empathy — the ability to understand reality beyond the limits of our own experience.  Stories offer this, and personal stories especially so.  It takes courage to write non-fiction memoir, to excavate for the deepest truths that live in the bone, but when we get there, when we put our stories into the world, this courage begets more courage, our vulnerability begets more vulnerability and writing from hope begets more hope.  

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Annahid is CEO and co-founder of Anima Leadership, a global-reaching socially innovative company that has been revolutionizing JEDI (justice, equity, diversity and inclusion) work in organizations and communities since 2006. Over the last twenty-five years Annahid has inspired, educated and coached thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations toward deeper experiences of belonging.

With a Masters in Education and undergraduate degree in psychology, as well as additional certifications in Process Work conflict facilitation, Somatic experiencing trauma training, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, she brings a deeply inside-outside approach to cultivating systemic shifts. She started out as a political activist organizing national campaigns but now focuses on change one conversation, one compelling story at a time. 

Alongside writing for various publications, she’s author of the best-selling memoir Breaking the Ocean which Ms. Magazine prophesied “may change you” and her latest book Bones of Belonging: Finding Wholeness in a White World. A leading voice on race, trauma and immigration, she also hosts the podcast Soundwaves of Belonging, featuring intimate and irreverent conversations with fellow bridge-builders. Having grown up in three different countries—Iran, England and Canada—on three different continents, Annahid is a citizen of the world, a lover of stories and a truth speaker for a more just future.

BONES OF BELONGING: FINDING WHOLENESS IN A WHITE WORLD

Sharp, funny, and poignant stories of what it’s like to be a Brown woman working for change in a white world.

I take a deep breath, check my lipstick one last time on my phone camera, and turn on my mic. It’s about ten steps, two metres, and one lifetime to the front of the room. “Hello,” I repeat. “My name is Annahid ― pronounced Ah-nah-heed ― and shit’s about to get real!”

In a series of deft interlocking stories, Annahid Dashtgard shares her experiences searching for, and teaching about, belonging in our deeply divided world. A critically acclaimed, racialized immigrant writer and recognized inclusion leader, Dashtgard writes with wisdom, honesty, and a wry humour as she considers what it means to belong ― to a country, in a marriage, in our own skin ― and what it means when belonging is absent. Like the bones of the human body, these stories knit together a remarkable vision of what wholeness looks like as a racial outsider in a culture still dominated by whiteness.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing