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At the age of thirty-four, while most of my girlfriends hurriedly made babies before their fertility windows closed, I received a diagnosis of stage three breast cancer. I did not feel sick. I ate cleanly, biked to work, practiced yoga regularly, looked radiant, and my body was trying to kill me. Physically, I felt great. Emotionally, I was a mess. Recently broken up from my first long-term relationship, I returned to Washington, DC, where I had not lived since I was eighteen. People I knew were settling down in careers and first homes while I was in debt, living at my mom’s, and working for a dysfunctional international organization. I longed to belong to life but I contemplated my death daily. That’s when I started taking coffee up my butt. I explored alternative treatments with a doctor at an integrative health center in Tenleytown. She used coffee enemas as part of a complex detoxification protocol. Every week for a year, cooled organic decaf arabica would flow through a tube into my rectum until it was full. After many minutes alone in the room (during which I sometimes sang to myself and usually failed to relax), a nurse would return and allow me to release my bowels. We would do this again three or four times each session. Colonics have long been believed to detoxify the body. Around 1500 BCE, an ancient Egyptian medical document Ebers papyrus described the benefits of colon cleansing, and many traditional healing systems have some type of colonic irrigation. Coffee enemas are thought to detoxify the liver. Does it work? I’m not sure. At least it didn’t hurt my recovery and wasn’t painful. Why is this relevant at the beginning of a book about belonging? Belonging is an expression of life. I would have done anything to belong to the living. Also, everything is relevant when we talk about belonging. The challenge with belonging in these times is “everything” includes a whole lot of things, including coffee poop. We live in a world where previously isolated languages, cultures, and beliefs have been melded into each other. Each of us has a multitude of influences, various identities, and countless experiences. Furthermore, things are bananas out there. We are presented with a dizzying array of choices every day—what to eat, use, read, watch, follow, post, support, say, believe—choices that align us with particular ideas, values, and communities . . . or not. In any moment, we may feel like we belong to one thing and not another. I belong to this community, to which others don’t. I belong to this statement, definitely not that one. I belong in this space way over here. Or perhaps I belong nowhere. The truth: we all belong to it all. Also to death.