Belonging

There’s a strange dissonance in being surrounded by everything you think you should need, yet still feeling untethered, like a wandering star forever orbiting but never landing. I’ve sat at countless tables, felt the warmth of laughter ripple through me, seen faces turned toward mine with care and recognition—and yet, there is always that distance, invisible but insurmountable. It’s as if my soul exists a step removed from the world, suspended in a space that no one else can enter. I’ve tried to explain it, even to myself. But how do you describe the feeling of being a stranger in your own life?

I’ve learned how to move through it, of course. I’ve become an architect of my own belonging, building bridges of conversation, laying foundations of shared moments. People see me as adaptable, present, connected. And maybe I am, in fragments. But beneath the surface, there is a quiet yearning that I can never ignore. It whispers to me when the laughter fades and the rooms grow still: You are not where you are meant to be. I don’t know if it’s a call to somewhere else or simply the echo of my own longing, ricocheting endlessly within me.

For so long, I believed this ache was a flaw to be fixed, a wound to be healed. I searched for answers outside of myself, thinking that a place, a person, a purpose might finally anchor me. But as the years pass, I am beginning to realize: the ache is not a void to fill, but a map to follow. It is the part of me that refuses to settle, the part that knows I was not made to fit neatly into the spaces the world offers. I am not untethered because I am lost—I am untethered because I am still becoming.

Maybe this is what it means to belong: not to a place or to others, but to the endless, unfolding journey of yourself. To hold your own contradictions with tenderness, to make peace with the fact that you are both whole and unfinished. I am learning that the distance I feel is not a flaw; it is space, vast and full of possibility. Maybe the greatest act of belonging is not finding where I fit, but creating the world where I am enough, just as I am. In that, the ache does not vanish but softens, transforming into something almost beautiful, something like hope.