The Ordinary Turned Precious: A Quest for Belonging (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781738091102)

This is one woman's story on the universal quest for belonging, and the power of human resilience in finding meaning on the journey. This is a story of courage, self-discovery, and meaning-making. In these pages, readers will find a reflection of their own journey, as they navigate the delicate tension of multiple truths coexisting and finding themselves in between all the spaces to which they belong.

Roselle's migration to Canada as a young adolescent would yield a profound bifurcation of her very identity: too Indian for the new place, and over time, too Canadian to be fully Indian again. By the time she is 23, she yearns to belong fully to one place, and in vain has attempted to sever her ties to the parts of herself that are rooted in the old country, all the things that make her bad and unbelonged, paradoxically less than and too much. When she is faced with the loss of connection to her beloved Papa - a symbol for the rupture of her connection from her roots - Roselle is compelled to face her grief through a journey of self-discovery and mending.

In this odyssey that spans a decade, Roselle (re)connects with her roots, finding meaning and her sense of belonging. This is a story of love and self-reclamation, where each step echoes the resilience of a heartbeat. Through each return to the embrace of her ancestral soil, Roselle uncovers new layers of herself, delicately peeling away the scars of old wounds. She is the bridge between two worlds.

As a woman who lives in the space between here and there, then and now, herself and the world, Roselle explores the tension of spaces in which multiple truths can coexist, where histories collide, and generations connect. With bracing honesty and vulnerability reminiscent of Roxane Gay's Hunger and Charlotte Gill's Almost Brown, Roselle explores the life experiences that have shaped who she is in the world. The Ordinary Turned Precious brings readers along on Roselle's journey of emerging, not as a fragmented being torn between two worlds, but as something precious woven with the golden threads of what it means to know who you are, and where you come from: to know where you belong.