Goodbye again, Inkhaven
Today, I’m watching a group of people process the end of their Inkhaven, and I am apart from it
At the first Inkhaven, someone asked if I could describe the feeling of being an outsider. I thought for a long moment, but I didn’t know how to answer. Instead, I asked him, “Is there something that it’s like to be an insider?”
He didn’t know, having grown up between countries. Neither did my friend sitting next to me. Neither did I.
It’s cliché to say that you never really fit in, growing up. That’s not exactly it, anyway: I was quite socially successful as a kid; I didn’t lack for friends. I just never really felt like a member of a group, other than my nuclear family.
In the 2000s, there were only a handful of other hapa kids in my hometown — two or three pairs of siblings in my two-thousand-person high school. I never had the experience of being in a group of people who looked like me, who shared my background. I grew up in theater but wasn’t queer. I spent a lot of my time in college with an a cappella group I wasn’t actually in. I’ve always been apart somehow, on the periphery, wondering what it’s like to be at the core of a group.
I have spent the past month at Inkhaven, among the residents, but not one of them; on the campus, yet separated from everyone by a meter of wooden counter. I don’t mind this; I’m glad to have had a neatly circumscribed role to play this month, rather than hovering around the edges like a ghost of Inkhaven past.
But what people are going through today, on their last day of Inkhaven, is not happening to me. I am watching from the outside.
A sense of belonging has always been elusive, and I’ve learned to roll with that. I used to prefer organizing events over attending them, because it gave me a clear role. It set me apart from the group, and I wasn’t comfortable any other way.
But at the first Inkhaven, I was part of the group. Unquestionably. We were all going through the experience together, and I was right in the middle of it all, accepted, loved, an integral part of what was happening. It was unlike anything I’d experienced in years and years. A sense of belonging so easy I didn’t even interrogate it.
Earlier this month, I wrote that there was something magical at the first Inkhaven that was missing from this one. Maybe that was true. More likely, I think it was just missing for me.
It’s been a wonderful month. I wrote some things I’d been wanting to write for years, I tried running a business for the first time, and I had all sorts of fun, weird, deep, and unsettling conversations with the sweet, verbose weirdos here.
But as I sit here at my second Inkhaven closing session, preparing to sing the song I wrote for Inkhaven 1, I want to cry a little bit. Not just because I’ll miss these people, but also because I miss my Inkhaven. I miss the place where I belonged.