Belonging in public while far from home

Claiming the top spot among all spring break destinations: Liverpool, crown jewel of Merseyside. With my pasty skin and Protestant upbringing, I felt at home stepping onto my Aer Lingus ride from JFK. Clearly, so did my seatmate, who undressed for the night before sitting down. His trainer fell from the overhead bin onto my lap, serving as a convenient conversation starter about the broken state of U.S. health insurance.

Not content with a breezy holiday even in a breezy country, I flew in with a hunch: mid-sized British towns might offer a pleasing urbanism and rich public texture. I used to visit the U.K. (read: London) because I liked the row houses and public transport. That’s still true! But I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that something deeper was resonating within me. In the U.S., the dichotomy is: if you want to live in a city, you move to New York. If you have kids—or you’re tired of feeling invisible—you leave. You can guess which of those applies to me. Goo goo gah gah.

By day four of sitting on a clean train, I was ready to up and move. I read Britain in moderation hourly to self-flagellate. Two thoughts were solidifying in my mind:

1. Existing easily in public has meaning to me, even when I don’t speak to anyone
2. Some places make this easier than others

With that, my theory on public belonging, or background belonging, was born. The million-DSM-V question is whether lower friction public belonging also leads to personal belonging. We can table that one for now, because no one knows.

In Jake Gyllenhal’s most iconic train-based time travel movie, Source Code, he says, “Look at all this…All this life.” Similarly, I felt alive walking off the train in Leeds City Centre and following the stream of people into what turned out to be a mall, but could have been a cliff edge. In my uni years, I did the same thing in the buzzy campus library or at (American) football games. I once quipped to no one in particular, “I’d rather sit in this stadium by myself because there are more people here than in my dorm room.” I didn’t have the language for it then, but public belonging was already motivating how I spent my days.

I assume this has something to do with autism. I like people and being part of something, but I tend to be underwhelmed by what that looks like in practice. I am drawn to cities, stadiums, trains—places belonging doesn’t have to be earned. I also assume this is amplified given my post-institution proclivities. Family, religion, school, work. These days, my time building From Scratch looks at that 20th-century blueprint the way Gen Z looks at the MGM lion that used to roar before a film: with recognition, but knowing its time has passed. Or was that 20th Century Fox? The past is the past.

Perhaps the clearest embodiment of background belonging from my trip was the humble British pub. Counter service only, contactless payments, no tipping or scribbling on a damp piece of paper, plus you can order half pints. Three pounds and I can just sit here contentedly?! I returned home ranting to anyone who would listen about how bars in the U.S. feel like expensive, performative rituals masking a broken social contract. Happy to join your next bar crawl and elaborate.

Before I figured out how to use my mobile phone like the youth, I bought my train tickets from a person at a window. It was a reasonably positive experience! If I were an extrovert, I would’ve bought them a cuppa and asked if they were paid a living wage and felt respected by society. Living in New York has made me immune to feeling invisible, and it was eye-opening to see it doesn’t have to be that way. My goal isn’t to romanticize British life, and it's not even that people were particularly friendly. I just felt a basic amount of dignity as I moved through the world. In the U.S., we self-select between either the chaos of our biggest cities or the friendliness of small towns. When I find something in between, I’ll shut down this newsletter.

My hypothesis was put to the test on my first night across the pond as I attended a pub crawl in Liverpool. Could public belonging and personal belonging co-exist? My three companions didn’t know they were part of such a rigorous sociological study as we stopped in four watering holes. The conversation was good enough and I was happy to be sipping an ale in a Liverpudlian living room. In my last conversation of the evening, still crawling but now back on two feet, I bonded with the host over our newly-discovered neurodivergence. We both felt seen.

I strolled contentedly back through the city, stopping to bask in the human hum outside Lime Street Station. A sloshed lad said something inappropriate to me, and his friend opened an Asahi with his teeth and handed it to me as a peace offering. The city’s rich tapestry felt warmer after my social evening. I brushed off the scuff marks from my earlier run-in with a falling trainer and gazed up at the Radio City Tower. For just a moment, I belonged.