Your Inner Sanctuary
I question where I can settle down, place my roots into the earth and create my own legacy.
A dilemma I’ve faced is feeling like an outsider and hence, I’ve moved all over the world and within the US. Sometimes voluntarily and sometimes by force.
No matter where I go, I feel like I am not accepted and do not belong. The circumstances always vary but I started to question its source within me.
Ever since I was a child, I felt like an outsider. I felt different and as a child, you don’t feel different with the sole intention to isolate yourself from others because most children’s desires is to belong, to play. Children are innocent.
I was born innocent but I felt permeable. I felt like air. I felt like I existed beyond my body. I did not belong to my self but to beyond the self.
I masked this by reading, playing by myself but it took me until this age to realize that by consistently putting myself aside, I lost my identity to others, to who I was and where I belonged to.
No place felt like home because I did not feel at home within my self. Because at the same time I felt like my home was beyond myself.
I also had the experience of instability throughout my entire life that made me question what home meant for me. So many foreclosures and experiences of homelessness.
And I lost myself finding a sense of belonging in other groups, whether religious, ethnic, and so forth.
I think as a child I knew we are all interconnected and I had a hard time differentiating between what separated us and now no matter where I went, I struggled to settle in…because I do not know where I belong or if I will be accepted.
It’s a perpetual tension and I’ve come to terms that the majority will never understand.
The paradox of growing up with too much of an open heart where boundaries and categories never existed left me displaced internally.
The idea of what can separate or unify us can be dismantled when we question whether we are at homes within ourselves.
Truly explore, maybe in a way that leads to an existential crisis, as to how much at home you are with yourself.
Do you accept all parts of yourself? Do you embody your truth? Because no matter where you walk, where you lay your roots at or build your home or where you lay your bones to rest or scatter it’s ashes, that essence of home will always be there within you.
It will not budge and others can not move it aside.
It’s this insurmountable energy that dominates beyond space and time, beyond flesh, and beyond the constructs of man.
When you feel like an outsider, you have to have compassion for yourself and boldly carve out the space that you deserve to have in this world.