I BELONG

I don’t belong 

I’m the odd one out

A square peg in a round hole 

I don’t know when this became my inner narrative. I don’t remember when it first took root. 

But somehow it did.

Somehow this became the story that underpinned how I saw myself in the world.

It became the bedrock of who I was, baked into my bones, written into my spine, exhaled on my breath.

I armoured up, ready to go into battle, to defend and protect. The muscles of my breath and soft tissue of my body, braced in readiness. 

Layers and layers of stories, told time and time again, growing in magnitude with each new telling. 

Until one day the stories no longer made sense and I sought to unravel them, to trace back through the maze and to find the starting point, to go back to where it all began.

To unpick the tangled knots of my scattered thoughts and find freedom from an old belief pattern that no longer made sense to me.

And so I sought out the company of other women to sit in circle with, the company of women who, like me, were looking to tell their stories as well as being willing to hear mine. I sought them out, because a part of me knew that in order for me to see who I was, I needed to look into the eyes of other women and to see who they were.

And within the spaces of these circles, through story telling and rituals, something happened; something magical, profound and sacred.

The bones of my body started to settle into each other, the spaces between them expanded and relaxed with my breath, & oscillated gently within the ocean of my fluid body. My flesh softened and moulded around my bones, my skin loosened its grip on my shape.

I felt myself come back into my body and I felt it in my bones, it was a feeling of belonging, presence, connection and love.

Yet still the words can come back to me, a whisper that says “I don’t belong” , I can feel the familiar sensations arrive into my body, a pull on my rib cage, a tightening in my breath, a heaviness in my belly, a contraction around my heart. 

But something feels different now. 

Like a wave coming ashore, I can watch it come in, depending on the ferocity of the wave it may pull me under by its strength or it may just toss me gently in the shallows, either way I now know that I will find my way to the surface and a way to breathe freely again. 

And so when it happens, when I hear my old stories resurfacing, I now smile to myself. For it is like an old friend, an old stupid friend, knocking on my door to remind me of how far I have journeyed, and who I am now. I imagine myself sitting at a table, surrounded by all the different parts of myself, I welcome them all here, and I know that I belong.