On Belonging to Yourself

I hope I’m not the first person to tell you this, but you must refuse to make your life into a series of quiet trades.

We are taught directly and indirectly, from a young age, how to belong to other people…soften our edges, shift our tones, and shape-shift our desires.

Without realising it, you find yourself exchanging a sliver of your truth for someone’s comfort, a piece of you to avoid conflict, and a chunk of your identity just to be easy to swallow.

Eventually, you look in the mirror and realise you’ve given away every piece of yourself to keep everyone else satisfied.

In order to ‘win,’ you’re expected to assess the room, figure out what it wants, and morph into that shape. So we perform these characters to gain approval, and slowly become experts at self-abandonment.

You abandon your intuition to pander to people who don’t know, and more often do not care about your heart. You abandon your rest to keep up with a culture that equates activity with worth.

To belong to yourself means putting an end to those quiet betrayals of your essence.

Belonging to yourself is not an act of selfishness. People are naturally self-preserving; they’ll protect their comfort long before they protect your boundaries.

One of my teachers used to say, “There’s a difference between having knowledge of a thing and coming to the realisation of that knowledge.”

Once you are hit with the reality of this primal nature, the call to belong to yourself comes from inside. How you choose to respond is entirely up to you.

If you are answering the call, it becomes imperative that you (in this order):

• Always trust your internal compass.

• Treat your boundaries as non-negotiable.

• Refuse to ask permission for your own choices.

• Allow yourself to be misunderstood.

• Honour those who honour you, and dismiss those who diminish you.
  

Maya Angelou once observed, “You are only free when you realise you belong no place, you belong every place; no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”

The price is indeed high when you begin belonging to yourself, but the reward is total freedom.

Of course, it would be dishonest to talk about self-belonging as a purely personal, internal achievement as though the only obstacle were your own hesitation.

For many of us, the trading started long before we had the self-awareness to choose otherwise.

And if you were one of the few who resisted early, don’t mistake yourself as exempt. You paid too, in the currency of time spent defending your rebellion instead of living in it, explaining yourself to people who were never going to understand and wouldn’t have believed you if they did.

And then the retreat into isolation, once you realised no explanation was ever going to land.

This is why belonging to yourself is not neutral advice. It’s an act of historical and structural reclamation, and not just a mindset shift.

Happy healing 🎈