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I often think about belonging when people talk about newcomers, as if it begins the moment your status changes. The story we tend to tell is simple: you arrive, you settle, you receive permanent residency or citizenship, and then you belong. It’s a clean narrative and makes sense on paper. But it doesn’t reflect how the immigrant life unfolds.
For me, belonging didn’t start with paperwork. It started when I arrived as a student.
Like many international students, I came with excitement, uncertainty, and hope. And very quickly, I was learning how to live in a new place in the most ordinary ways. Every day that I walked off campus toward the bus stop, I was mapping the city in my head. There's the building where I get my health card. Got it. Does the African grocery store I passed on the way to church carry Stoney ginger beer? I'll check later. Build in extra time, because Google Maps has steered me wrong too often. Done.
None of it felt dramatic while I was navigating classes and assignments from day one. But that’s what building a life looks like, in the most ordinary ways.
And over time, those small things started to become routines. I learned my way around the city without thinking too hard about it. I found places I returned to again and again. I built friendships, joined communities, and volunteered. I figured out how to exist in Vancouver in a way that felt increasingly natural, even if nothing about my status had changed. I was already living the life I thought I was still preparing for.
But not everyone saw it that way. The first time that I was asked the question was during my first semester in grad school. I had recently joined a new church that had a mixture of young families, retirees, a number of recently graduated young adults, and the odd number of international graduate students. During the coffee hour after church, while having small talk with an older couple, after learning that I moved to Vancouver for grad school, they asked me, “So, are you going back home after graduating?” At first, I was surprised because I'd only been in Canada less than 2 months. So I responded, “I'm not sure yet, I've only just started my program, but so far so good.”
When I went back to campus, I reflected on the question. It sounded like a normal question. Something people ask out of curiosity, almost casually. But over time, whether I was meeting new people at church, while volunteering, or simply connecting with other international students, I started to notice what it was really doing. It was placing me somewhere in between. Not fully here, not fully there, but just passing through. An insider-outsider, if you will. And the word that stayed with me was home.
But by that point, I was already building one. Quietly, in ordinary ways, through relationships, routines, and repetition that didn’t feel temporary at all. So each time I was asked that question, there was this subtle disconnect between how my life felt to me, and how it was being understood from the outside.
On one side, I had a life that was fully taking shape. Friends I could call, people who knew me, responsibilities that consumed my day. I felt a sense of place and a rhythm to my days. But on the other side, I was still being positioned as someone who would eventually leave.
And that gap — between lived experience and outside perception — is where belonging and the word “temporary” starts to feel complicated. Because even if your status says temporary, your life doesn’t always behave like it. That’s why I think the student years are often misunderstood. They’re treated like a pause before real life begins, but they aren’t a pause at all. They are where life quietly starts to take shape.
You’re studying, yes, but you’re also building something at the same time. You’re finding your routines. You’re learning how a place works. You’re forming relationships. You’re contributing to communities. You’re becoming part of the everyday fabric of a place long before any official recognition arrives.
Yet because systems are designed to recognise status rather than lived experience, those years are often overlooked. Status has a clear definition. It is measurable and has a date. Belonging does not. It builds slowly, through repetition, familiarity, and time.
So the student years get framed as a waiting period, instead of what they actually are — the early formation of a life. When we miss that, we misunderstand people’s journeys. We see students as if they are just beginning, even when they have already been here for years. We don’t see the friendships they’ve built, the routines they’ve established, or the ways they’ve already contributed to the communities around them. We see arrival, but we miss everything that came before it.
Canada is often described as a destination where people come to belong. But belonging doesn't wait for your status to catch up. It forms long before arrival, in the slow, ordinary building of a life that doesn't look like belonging at first and becomes it through repetition, through showing up in a place until it starts to feel like yours. Looking back, I don't see a contradiction anymore. I was here, but still 'temporary.' I was building a life, but not yet recognised as part of it. Maybe that feeling of in-between is the process itself.
And maybe that’s when belonging begins.
