The Price of Belonging

“On Sicily, autonomy and what we give up to be part of something”

Coming back to London after several weeks in Sicily, I found myself thinking about something I have probably been negotiating for most of my life: the tension between belonging to a collective and remaining an individual within it.

My parents emigrated from Sicily to the UK and Sicily remained a significant part of my life as I grew up. I later made London my home and have lived here for a considerable part of my adult life. In some ways, I have always had a foot in both worlds.

Sicily represents something deeply familiar to me: family, community, people knowing one another across generations, conversations taking place in streets and piazzas, lives overlapping whether we intend them to or not. London has offered me something equally valuable: independence, privacy, anonymity and the freedom to construct a life largely on my own terms.

Neither feels entirely sufficient without the other.

We tend to think of autonomy as an uncomplicated good. The freedom to choose how we live, whom we love, where we go and how much of ourselves we reveal feels fundamental to modern life. And in many ways it is.

But spending time in Sicily again this summer reminded me that autonomy has a price, just as belonging does.

Perhaps what we struggle with is not simply the tension between the individual and the collective, but the fact that each gives us something we need while asking us to give up something else

My life, my business

I was reminded of this ‘dilemma’ during a conversation in Sicily this summer. I'll call the woman Rita and alter the details.

Rita had been meeting a male friend for coffee at the same local bar. There was nothing particularly significant about it. They were friends, they enjoyed one another's company and when they happened to be in the same place they sometimes sat together.

After a while, however, people began asking questions.

Who was he? How did she know him? Were they together? Somebody had seen them on Tuesday. Somebody else had noticed them the week before.

Rita was irritated.

"It's my life," she said. "Why does everybody need to know what I'm doing?"

It was difficult to disagree with her. It was her life. She was free to have coffee with whomever she chose and nobody had any right to tell her otherwise.

But something about the conversation stayed with me.

Because perhaps Rita wasn't really encountering a restriction on her autonomy at all. Nobody was stopping her from doing anything.

Perhaps Rita hadn't lost her autonomy at all. What she had lost was her anonymity.

She was entirely free to sit in that bar with whomever she liked. What she couldn't necessarily do, in a small interconnected community, was do it unnoticed.

And that distinction interests me.

Autonomy and anonymity

In highly individualised cultures, autonomy and anonymity often travel together.

We become accustomed not only to making our own choices but also to having considerable control over who knows about them.

In London I can sit in a café with somebody and reasonably expect that nobody at the next table knows who I am, who they are, whether I am married, whether they are married, who my parents were, what happened at somebody's wedding fifteen years ago or whether our families have fallen out.

There is enormous freedom in this.

It allows us to experiment, change, make mistakes and reinvent ourselves without every version of us being witnessed by the same people.

In Sicily, particularly in smaller towns and communities, life can operate differently.

You are not simply an individual arriving in a bar. You are somebody's daughter, cousin, neighbour, childhood friend. Your history may precede you into the room.

There can be something deeply comforting about this.

There can also be something profoundly irritating about it.

The double edge of gossip

We usually talk about gossip as though it were unquestionably undesirable and therefore unwanted.

And of course it can be. Gossip can be intrusive, cruel and inaccurate. It can shame people, monitor behaviour and make difference difficult. In close communities, the awareness of being observed can become constricting. The collective can exert pressure without ever explicitly telling us what to do.

But I wonder whether gossip also has another function that we can sometimes overlook.

The network through which somebody discovers that Rita has been having coffee with the same man is also the network through which people discover that someone's mother has gone into hospital.

It is how somebody knows that an elderly neighbour hasn't opened her shutters that morning.

It is how news travels that somebody has died, that a marriage has broken down, that a child has returned home, that someone is struggling financially or that a family might need help.

Information travels because lives overlap.

The same social architecture that sometimes feels intrusive can also make people extraordinarily visible to one another.

Surveillance and care can grow from surprisingly similar roots.

This doesn't make intrusive gossip benign. But it does complicate our understanding of it.

The question becomes whether we can be known enough to be cared for without also being known enough to be judged and scrutinised?

I'm not sure that we can.

The freedom not to be known

London offers almost the opposite bargain.

Here, privacy is relatively easy to obtain. We can move between different worlds - work, friendships, relationships, neighbourhoods - without those worlds necessarily knowing very much about one another.

We decide what to disclose and to whom.

That freedom matters enormously to me.

But there is another side to it.

It is possible to live in a city of millions of people and remain remarkably unknown.

Nobody notices who you had coffee with.

Nobody asks why you haven't been at the bar for three mornings because there isn't necessarily a bar where everybody expects you to appear.

Nobody necessarily knows that the shutters haven't opened.

We often describe this as privacy. Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it can be loneliness.

And perhaps one of the difficulties of contemporary individualism is that the line between the two is not always obvious.

We have become extremely good at protecting ourselves from intrusion while simultaneously becoming concerned about isolation, disconnection and the erosion of community.

We want people to care without interfering.

We want to be known without being scrutinised.

We want community without obligation and autonomy without loneliness.

Perhaps those things cannot always be separated as neatly as we would like.

What we inherit

For those of us who have grown up between cultures, this tension can feel particularly familiar.

My parents brought Sicily with them when they emigrated to the UK. Like many immigrant families, they carried not only language, food and traditions but a way of understanding human relationships in which family and community occupied enormous psychological space.

Growing up in Britain offered me something different: individuality, privacy and the freedom to make my own choices. Living in London took that notion one step further and gave me even more of that freedom - the ability to choose my communities rather than simply inherit them.

Perhaps part of the immigrant experience is learning to move between those two systems without ever belonging entirely to either.

The collective can feel suffocating when you are inside it and strangely comforting when you have been away from it.

Individualism can feel liberating until you encounter its loneliness.

I notice this each time I move between Sicily and London.

In Sicily, there are moments when I want people to know less.

In London, there are moments when I wonder whether we know enough about one another at all.

The price we pay

Perhaps every way of organising human life involves a trade.

Belonging has a price.

It asks us to tolerate other people's curiosity, expectations and opinions. It brings obligations. It means that sometimes our choices reverberate beyond ourselves. Other people may notice what we would prefer them not to notice.

Sometimes they will talk.

But autonomy has a price too.

We gain privacy, independence and the freedom to define ourselves. Yet we may also become more anonymous, more fragmented and less embedded in the lives of others.

Nobody is interfering.

But nobody may be noticing either.

Conclusion

Perhaps the challenge isn't to decide whether the collective or the individual is better. Both answer something profoundly human.

We need freedom, but we also need attachment.

We need privacy, but we also need to be known.

We need lives that belong to us while also belonging somewhere.

Maybe the task is to create families, friendships, neighbourhoods and relationships in which we can remain sufficiently autonomous without becoming isolated and sufficiently connected without becoming engulfed.

Sicily doesn't provide an answer to that question, nor does London. But moving between them makes the tension particularly visible.

In Sicily, belonging can sometimes feel inconvenient. Other people have expectations. They ask questions. They notice things. Occasionally they know things we'd rather they didn't.

In London, we are more easily afforded the opposite. We can protect our privacy, determine our boundaries and move through the world relatively unnoticed.

And yet perhaps being unnoticed is not always the same thing as being free.

There may be something we lose when nobody knows enough about our lives to interfere with them.

So perhaps the question is not how to achieve perfect autonomy or perfect belonging. It is how much of each we are willing to exchange for the other.

How much privacy are we prepared to surrender in order to be known, and how much belonging are we prepared to surrender in order to be free?

There may be no comfortable answer.

Perhaps that is precisely the point.

Being part of something can be inconvenient.

But inconvenience may occasionally be part of the price of belonging.