“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.” –

Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong?

There’s a strange disembodied loneliness about being in a place or with a group of people and feeling like you don’t quite fit there. Scale that up over a lifetime and you can’t fail to see now that can lead to constant questioning and my own unending search within myself to try to seek out situations where I can be myself and still belong.

At this stage of midlife, I have gone way past the teenage angst of moulding myself to fit a particular genre in order to fit in at school. A relatively academic kid due to my ability to hyperfocus on things that interested me, and with an aptitude for music (if not a consistent practising ethic) I got by on companionship of like minded peers but it was a bit like existing on the smell of fish and chips when someone walks past you in the street with them. Close friendships eluded me. Still do to a certain extent.

Who do I even want to belong to? How can I find it and stay authentically me?

Maya Angelou talks about belonging nowhere and everywhere in her famous quote. It’s definitely more of an aspiration for me and I am still working out how to move towards it. There are some things I am doing that seem to be working for me though so l wanted to share them here. The quote from Brené Brown at the beginning of this post is the key. Confirmation bias is a seductive trap to fall into. Particularly if, like me, you are a socially awkward, introverted, overthinking, deeply sensitive soul with a spidey sense for rejection. So I am looking inwards at myself and making intentional, positive choices to maximise the positive.

Much like with my daily practice of gratitude and my new #dailydelights (inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delights) I am interested to see if belonging and confidence in myself can be strengthened like a muscle through repetitive positive actions. I also know that trying to follow some of the conventional “put yourself out of your comfort zone” wisdom leaves me feeling alienated and diminished and that kind of CBT or desensitisation approach doesn’t work for my brain. So what works for me?

How to work with your brain instead of against it.

Firstly, is might be useful to state that all brains are different, mine is more likely to be neurospicy in its formatting and that is most definitely a blog post of its own! I’m also middle aged so I have lots of experience of pushing against the wrong door here. Glennon Doyle writes beautifully about the disembodiment of abandoning yourself over and over again to fit a cultural or gender role and Sue Monk Kidd talks about blessing the largeness inside ourselves. Both of these concepts have helped me to seek out ways to not try to shrink myself in order to fit in and cultivate belonging. I’ll explain the steps I went through…

Where do you belong?

Think about the places you love to go where you don’t have to think about what other people think or say. For me that is most often in natural spaces. I’m fortunate to live near the coast so can walk on the beach or through fields near my home. Sometimes I like to climb hills, leg aching, lung bursting climbs that reward me with timeless vistas. I love the soul shifting clarity that comes from a swim in the sea, no mean feat in the cold waters where I live. My body speaks to me in barely audible whispers after years of being ignored, so I put it in situations where it has to shout. I can find other places too, anywhere classical music is being performed, art galleries, museums and other places where I can satisfy my endless curiosity. Pay attention too, to the time of day when you feel at your best. I have executive function that diminishes as the day goes on so I’m most me in the early mornings. You may be a night owl who loves to stargaze.

What do you like to spend time doing?

Martha Beck says the opposite of anxiety is creativity. For someone like me who has a high degree of social anxiety I have found amazing belonging in creative spaces. Particularly those with clear social structures or rules. Orchestras and choirs have periods of collaborative creativity where everyone works together for a common goal. If music isn’t your thing then perhaps an art class where everyone works individually but in parallel may help you to work on unlocking creativity. I love to write but lack aptitude to invent characters or plot lines, knitting is easier than crochet.

Who can you be yourself with? Who helps you feel whole?

This one is more challenging. There are people I interact with who make me feel seen and heard (sometimes In tiny ways) and some who, in subtle ways leave me feeling diminished or that I’m too much for. I have spent a huge amount of energy over the years trying to work out how much I need to shrink myself to not overwhelm them and risk that fracture of connection. I’m here to tell you to give up. if you have to carve off bits of yourself to be accepted then it’s not worth the sacrifice. Oh it’s tempting but it’s futile. That’s not to say that you need cut yourself off from these people – they may be lovely people, co-workers or family members. I’m saying not to direct your precious energy flow in their direction for too long. Find people who have you feeling better after interacting with them and expand on that. I am a perpetual studier of other people and love seeing now people can make others feel seen, not in order to copy a behaviour but in the way that looking for delightful things every day makes me more likely to notice things that delight me.

Put these elements together

So if you have been paying attention to the places you like to be yourself, the types of things you like to do and the sort of people you like to interact with then you have been doing two of the most important things on the path towards belonging. Firstly you have been identifying positive environments that work for you and thinking about how to expend your precious energy in those directions. But, perhaps more importantly, you have stopped to think about what you like, what fills you up and what drains you. When was the last time you gave yourself permission to look inside and ask yourself what you really want?

Now your building blocks may be vastly different to mine which are based on a degree of privilege that does not go unappreciated. You may have completely different interests to me and that’s great! What are they? How does your body tell you this is a good thing? How can you find time to expand on this, even in a tiny way?

Know yourself, believe in yourself, be human enough to belong to yourself.

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