For most of my life, people told me I needed to choose belonging.

• “Put yourself out there.”
• “Find your people.”
• “Claim your space.”

And I believed this overly simplified messaging and even tried it on for size.

No matter how hard I tried, belonging always felt fragile. Conditional. Like something I could lose without warning.

For a long time, I assumed the problem was me. It wasn’t.

I’m sharing this as a celebration, not for sympathy, but for those who may be wondering the same thing in their life, that have lived a different truth, with a similar outcome.

As a child, I moved schools constantly, not because I was difficult—but because of circumstance. New cities, new systems, adults making decisions doing their best without understanding what instability does to a child despite their own similar experiences.

By the time I was twelve, I had already learned an unspoken lesson: Connections don’t last.

At one school, I was told—publicly—that belonging was a choice. That if I didn’t feel like I belonged, that was on me.

The message was simple: Try harder.

What I felt wasn’t motivation. It was shame, because being told to choose belonging doesn’t work when your body doesn’t feel safe enough to try.

Here’s what we don’t say often enough:

• Belonging isn’t confidence.
• It isn’t charisma.
• It isn’t effort – although I think it does require effort

Belonging requires safety.

Belonging, for me, meant feeling welcome and connected without minimizing myself or apologizing for taking up space.

Without safety, the nervous system won’t cooperate—no matter how much you want connection.

While my story comes from relationships, this pattern shows up everywhere—in workplaces, families, communities, and classrooms—anywhere people are told to “belong” without first being made safe.

So instead of belonging, I adapted.

I learned to scan rooms. To read people quickly. To become independent early.

Those skills looked impressive. They helped me succeed, but they weren’t belonging.

They were survival.

From the outside, I appeared capable and self-sufficient.

Inside, I was armored.

Independence wasn’t freedom—it was protection. Love, when it appeared, felt temporary and withdrawable.

So I learned not to get too comfortable.

When Everything Shifted at Once

There wasn’t one breakthrough moment, but there was a period when several sources of stability shifted at the same time—and my old strategies stopped working.

A long-term relationship was ending; at the same time, another important relationship felt suddenly uncertain.

What mattered wasn’t the details—it was the impact.

I found myself in a familiar place:

• not feeling safe,
• not feeling secure,
• bracing for abandonment.

The fear underneath it wasn’t new.

It was fear of abandonment—the belief that closeness is temporary, that stability doesn’t last, and that eventually you’ll be left managing on your own.

For the first time, I couldn’t think my way out of it. I couldn’t independence my way through it, and that’s when I had to face something important:

• This fear wasn’t irrational.
• It was learned.

This is where therapy stopped being optional, not to eliminate the fear—but to understand it.

That fear wasn’t weakness. It was adaptation.

Once I stopped treating it as something shameful, something surprising happened.

I stayed with it. and people stayed too. Not everyone, not perfectly, but enough.

They didn’t withdraw when I hesitated. They didn’t punish me for being guarded. They didn’t disappear when things got uncomfortable.

They were consistent and consistency taught my nervous system something it had never learned:

I don’t have to disappear to survive this.

That realization didn’t fix everything, but it gave me a foothold.

The Mirror Shift

In therapy, I learned a metaphor that reframed my relationships: mirrors.

Some people hold small mirrors. They can only see part of you—the part that fits their worldview.

Others hold larger mirrors. They have the capacity to see more of you, including the complicated parts.

Understanding this freed me from chasing belonging where it wasn’t possible—and allowed me to invest where I was actually being seen.

Belonging as Practice

Here’s the idea that changed my life:

Belonging isn’t something you find. It’s something you practice—once safety exists.

Not by performing, not by proving, not by demanding space; but by arriving less guarded, by staying present, by taking up space without apology.

Over time, the room doesn’t grant permission.

It recognizes you.

Belonging Reconsidered

I still have old reflexes. Healing isn’t linear, but I no longer live in survival mode.

I no longer confuse independence with isolation, and I no longer chase belonging where it can’t exist.

The blackout curtain burned down.

What remains is light—sometimes steady, sometimes flickering—but real.

So if you’ve struggled with belonging, I want you to hear this clearly:

Nothing was wrong with you.

If belonging felt impossible, it may not have been absent—it may have been unsafe.

We tell people to “put themselves out there,” to “choose belonging,” without asking a more important question:

Is this space actually safe enough for someone to belong?

So I’ll leave you with this:

Where in your life have you been told to belong—without being made safe?
What would it take—in your relationships, your workplace, your community—to make belonging possible?

I have many wonderful people in my life in both my personal and work life who have seen me and have provided that space, and I’ve seen a generational shift has been amazing.