Maria I-Hsin Mulder. Even my name hints at my mixed heritage. I was born in Fiji, into a Dutch-Canadian Taiwanese family. Before high school graduation, I had lived in over 25 homes in 3 countries and attended six schools. I did not know where I belonged. 

This search for belonging lasted a long time. Elementary school saw my quest for belonging fixated on my ethnic origins. I wasn’t white. I wasn’t asian. I couldn’t even look to my parents as a frame of reference for what biracial existence could look like. This uncertainty led me to cling to the dogma of ultra-conservative christianity. For several years, I followed strict rules about modest clothing and ‘worldly’ music that even my parents found alien. Though it was suffocating to live this way, it was also safe and predictable. 

Grade 11 brought many changes. I stopped wearing long skirts. I started listening to mainstream music and reading literature that expanded my world. Joan Didion was the first non-fiction writer that truly altered me as a reader. The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir depicting the year after her husband’s death, exposed me to the feeling of emotional kinship–being so deeply connected to someone through similar experiences of grief. Much in the same way, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road also deeply changed me though that change is harder to articulate. High school also found me coming to terms with my identity as a lesbian. While my sexuality was met with hostility in Church, my faith was met with hostility in queer collectives. Through my first years in university, ‘belonging’ remained elusive. 

The quest for belonging is a lifelong one. Now, firmly planted in adulthood, I have found belonging in surprising places: in poetry written by other queer christians like Padraig O Tuama; in the political and artistic developments of artists like Beyonce and Lauryn Hill; in the rootedness of living in the same home for over 5 years. I look forward to progress in this quest as I explore the question of belonging in more abstract ways and ask questions about wisdom and knowledge, race and place, and so much more. For now, I can confidently step into labels that I feel define me as I know myself to be today. For now, I can say that I am a queer, biracial, person of colour. I am a visual artist, a liberal catholic, and rock climber. I am a baker, a birthworker, and a student. And for now, that’s enough.