(bright music) - Good evening, everybody.

When I was thinking about this question, I also got philosophical like Jason.

So I went to my books and I pulled out one from bell hooks and she has a line in it called, "I dreamed about a culture of belonging."

And I thought, "That's it.

That's where I'm gonna start when I think about this topic."

So as you heard, I'm a public health consultant, so I spend a lot of time in Washington D.C..

I've also spent time in Boston, Massachusetts.

I analyze things.

I put together things for very important people to speak about in Washington D.C.. And I'm pretty well-known as a forthright, confident, well-educated woman.

But, and still, there's another side, and that is that, for as long as I can remember, I've had a struggle to feel worthy of love, acceptance, and belonging.

And I also had a great deal of social anxiety that I mask in my daily life.

So my social anxiety has its roots very young in life.

When I was in preschool, I went, and I cried and I cried and I cried for weeks.

And there's someone in this audience who could attest to this.

For weeks, I cried in preschool.

And my mother went to preschool for weeks, and the teachers were like, "Do not leave.

We do not know what to do with this, so just stay by."

Eventually, (sighs) I calmed down.

I cried less.

My mother was able to leave the classroom, but I never felt comfortable there or in the next school I went to or in the school after that.

So I feel like my social anxiety is pretty innate.

I think I came here that way.

I also came here as a woman.

I also came here as an African American.

I'm also dyslexic.

So those are things about me that are just sort of my genetic makeup.

But when you do public health, there's a saying that says, "Genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger."

So my environment has had a very profound impact on my sense of belonging.

I'm a late-in-life child.

My parents are 42 and 43 when they had me, and they were very, very concerned that I might be defective because, you know, there wasn't fetal monitoring and all that stuff when I was born.

I'm 59 years old, so they were concerned I might have Down syndrome and some other way impaired.

And they discussed it.

They said, "What will we do?"

Because at that time, when you had a child who had Down syndrome, they was very common to send that child away to be raised at an institution.

And to their credit, they said, "You know what?

We're not gonna do that.

We're not gonna put her in an institution."

Well, I wasn't born with Down syndrome, but I don't think the anxiety that I was defective ever left my parents.

And I think it became part of my internalized social anxiety that I carried forward.

So as I kept going along during school, I kept not feeling like I belonged.

I tried to say I was Black and also Native American.

That didn't work out, didn't belong.

No one was buying that.

You know, I tried to... (Patricia groans) Oh, there's so many different things.

They're all rolling through my head right now.

But basically, there was a time when I was in fourth grade that I was at a new school, third school now, trying to get Patricia comfortable.

And I was asked to join a circle, and everything went as dim as something could go.

I probably was in my first full blown panic attack.

And I couldn't join the circle.

And like I had in preschool, I dissolved into tears again.

It was just too much.

And it was such an outsized reaction to simple requests by a teacher, "Come join our circle."

So I think about that a lot.

And I think that the metaphor of a circle has become the metaphor of how I thought about belonging.

So I had this very, for a lot of my life, I had a very rigid way of thinking about belonging.

You're either inside the circle or you're outside the circle.

You either belong or you don't.

It's cut and dry.

There's nothing else to this.

And I spent a lot of time worrying and wondering about how to get into circles, how to belong, how to be normalized in things.

And at some point, that shifted as I aged, and I started to care less about being in the circles.

I saw the circles, I knew they were there, I just didn't care as much anymore, because I realized it was causing me a lot of stress and I'm already the person who's socially anxious.

So I shifted and I decided I was gonna make my own circles.

That what was important to me was to create a place where I wanted to live and love and be happy, and to choose the people that were in my circle.

And that has been an infinitely rewarding shift for me.

So that's really what I wanted to share tonight, was that shift.

And as I went through it all, I started with bell hooks, but I wanted to end this evening with another quote.

And this one is from James Baldwin.

It says, "The place in which I will fit will not exist until I make it."

So that's my experience of belonging.

(audience applauds) (bright music)