The journey of trying to belong is more of an epic saga, one that we’ve been on for our entire lives.
It’s a long, sometimes exhausting trek along a path with many forks and many turns, sometimes well-maintained, and other times a weed filled mess.
Thus, our journey is almost never a smooth one. Quite honestly, we struggle for a good portion of our lives, grasping our way through our formative years, leaving us as adults who are struggling even more with finding our place in the world.
Most of us, I’m sure, have grown up with the idea that belonging is something that is earned, that is bestowed upon us. And with this belief, we try to force our way through our childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, as though we’re moving through molasses, trying to earn that treasured belonging with every group we come across.
This becomes exponentially harder when we clearly don’t fit into society’s mold for who we’re supposed to be at any given age.
Society can be brutal for the majority of us, at any age, and as women, it often feels as though we’re dealing with ridiculously high societal expectations around how we’re supposed to act, how we’re supposed to look, how we’re supposed to mother our children.
We’re told we’re too loud, too quiet, too skinny, too fat, too preppy, too weird, an annoying helicopter mom, too laid back with our kids, not healthy or natural enough, or too hippy dippy woo-woo when it comes to our kids.
There’s no winning with societal expectations.
And if that’s the case – how do we think that we can ever “achieve” belonging? If we can’t live up to society’s expectations for us, how can we expect that society will grant us that coveted badge of belonging?
We need to learn to shift how we look at belonging, how we look at the ways that we change ourselves, morphing into personalities that don’t sit right with us, that don’t feel right to us, in order to fit into what we believe we need to be in order to belong.
We can belong just as we are. We don’t need to change. You are enough. And you belong.
We all do.
We just need to learn how to come to accept ourselves, our true selves, and learn to love who we are in the core of our souls.
If you’re looking for some fellow weird, nerdy women, and moms, to share this weird, nerdy journey of belonging with, jump into our community , check out our resources, and connect with our supportive community of fantastic women.
