You Already Belong

Every so often, an interview with Barack Obama from about a year ago resurfaces on my social media feed. It’s the one where he says, “Don’t let people think you don’t belong. Because I promise you, once you sit at these tables…with folks with fancy titles…and you talk to them, you go, oh—they ain’t all that.”

Every time it comes across my screen, I get a bit emotional. But I promise it’s not about politics—or, at least, it’s not about capital “P” politics. It’s about the liberating recognition that the rooms we once thought were sacred or untouchable…are just rooms. And the people inside them are just people.

For me, that reminder hits hard because I’ve spent a lot of my life comparing myself against invisible benchmarks I didn’t consciously agree to. I’ve minimized my accomplishments because they didn’t look like someone else’s version of “prestige.” I’ve held myself to standards that were, in retrospect, arbitrary and often rooted in someone else’s insecurity. And when I trace that impulse back, it’s almost always tied to belonging, or, the desire to be seen as legitimate in spaces that weren’t designed for me to feel that way.

Obama’s point, I think, is not just about confidence. It’s about power. The subtle, steady kind that comes from realizing that the world is mostly run by people who are figuring it out as they go. Some are brilliant, for sure. Some are “fools.” But most are just…folk. Which means the hierarchy of brilliance, legitimacy, or worth that we imagine is often more fiction than fact.

There’s something subtly radical about that recognition. Once you start seeing power structures as human-made rather than divinely ordained, the whole edifice starts to wobble. And in that wobble is possibility, a recognition that if everyone at the table is just a person, then so are you. And if you’re already there, then you belong too.

And so I’ve been thinking about how belonging isn’t a static condition. It’s a practice. It’s not something granted. It’s something enacted through how we show up. Each time we use our individual and collective voices, we participate in a kind of renewal. A chorus, as it were. And a chorus is powerful not because everyone sings the same note, but because the harmony emerges from constructed and consented difference.

There’s a metaphysical beauty to that idea. Group power, when grounded in connection, becomes something emergent. It transcends the sum of its parts. Ethically, it demands co-responsibility; aesthetically, it creates harmony; politically, it requires continual tending. The moment we stop communicating, the song fades. But when we add our voices, the chorus grows louder. When we affirm our own power rather than waiting for permission, the sound expands.

That’s the part of Obama’s message that stays with me: you, yes you, already have power. The question, then, isn’t whether you belong. You do. The real questions are how you’ll use it, how you’ll contribute to the chorus, and how you’ll help shape the harmony that defines this moment.

Perhaps when you realize that even the fanciest tables are filled with ordinary people doing their best, you’ll sit down, take a deep breath, and start to sing. I’ll be right there with you.