True Belonging Starts Within Us

"You only are free when you realize you belong no place - you belong every place - no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great." – Maya Angelou

​In last month’s blog post about stories and community I touched on belonging and this month there’s more to say! I tend to lead with my heart if you hadn’t noticed, and belonging is near and dear to me. In fact, of the three basic human needs, safety, belonging, and dignity – my go-to and non-negotiable is belonging. For much of my life I’ve mixed up belonging and fitting in, this meant that belonging was about what others thought of me and how I could “fix” myself to be more liked, more accepted, sometimes just more. I have spent a lot of time proving my enoughness to fit in. Oof, that’s a lot of work and it’s exhausting work because there is a drum beat of “not enough” pounding in the background the whole time I do it. And all this work, as hard and draining as it is, hasn’t and won’t lead to true belonging because it can’t.

​True belonging is not about finding a certain place, group, or situation; instead it's about finding ourselves. True belonging starts within us. It starts with acceptance of who we’ve been, who we are, and who we are becoming. For me this idea of acceptance has been a bit of a bugaboo. I’m very practiced at conditional acceptance, when I do this, look like this, feel like this then …​

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