Content Warning: This section references sexual violence, domestic violence, and racial violence.

Gay introduces this motif in Essay 1 to immediately ground the text in The Fullness and Complexity of Humanity—her own and everyone else’s. In discussing her preoccupation with “connection and loneliness and community and belonging” (3), she also acknowledges that connection, community, and belonging are motivating factors for most people—i.e., human needs. Her awareness of this human need undergirds her attention to marginalization and how it is indicated in sociocultural artifacts and political ideology. She makes use of the motif again in Essays 3 and 4, conveying how these human emotions influence her experience of Scrabble and teaching.

In Part 2, Gay demonstrates how loneliness and the need for belonging motivated her desire to be liked by popular peers, as well as her identification with the Sweet Valley characters. In addition, she points put the role that her loneliness and need for connection played in the relationship with her middle school boyfriend and the traumatic experience that resulted. The latter example points to the ways that the need for connection, while harmless in and of itself, can lead people to compromise themselves for the sake of others, especially when oppressive forces are at play.