Sometimes the longest journey we’ll ever take is the one that leads us back to ourselves.
When I was a child, home announced itself long before we reached it. It was the smell of onions softening in a pot before dinner. The familiar creak of the front gate that no one ever remembered to oil. Shoes left carelessly by the door. A radio playing somewhere in the background while evening slowly settled over the neighbourhood. I never wondered whether I belonged there. I simply did. Children rarely ask if they have earned a place at the table. They arrive expecting there will be one.
Somewhere along the journey into adulthood, many of us lose that certainty. There is a moment—different for each of us—when belonging quietly becomes something we begin chasing. Perhaps it happens on the first day at a new school. Or when we’re the only person who looks different in the room. Perhaps it begins after rejection. Or failure. Or heartbreak. Sometimes it happens so gradually that we never notice the exact day it begins. We simply wake up one morning measuring ourselves against everyone else. Without meaning to, we start asking questions that childre
‘The people who truly welcome you are not giving you your worth. They are recognising the worth that was already there.’
Those questions have followed humanity for generations. Only the scenery changes. Years ago, I attended a gathering where I knew almost no one. The room buzzed with easy conversation. People greeted one another by name. Stories flowed effortlessly between old friends. I stood near a bookshelf pretending to study titles I wasn’t really reading. Every now and then, someone smiled politely before returning to a conversation that already seemed full. No one was unkind. Yet I felt strangely invisible.
After a while, I stepped outside. The evening air was cooler than I expected. Across the garden, a small child was chasing soap bubbles. Each time one floated out of reach, she laughed and ran after the next. She wasn’t wondering whether anyone was watching. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She was simply delighting in the moment she was already living. I don’t know why that stayed with me. But it did.
On the drive home, I realised something that has continued to unfold ever since. For much of my adult life, I had been entering rooms hoping they would tell me who I was. If people welcomed me, I belonged. If they didn’t, perhaps I didn’t. It was an exhausting way to live. Because it placed my sense of home in places I could never control.
Belonging, I’ve come to believe, begins much earlier than acceptance. It begins the moment we stop asking the world for permission to become ourselves. Not because we no longer value community. We do. Deeply. We were never meant to journey alone. But healthy communities don’t create our worth. They recognise it. The difference matters. One leaves us constantly performing. The other allows us to simply arrive.
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Quis ipsum suspendisse ultrices gravida. Risus commodo viverra maecenas accumsan lacus vel facilisis.
‘When I moved to Cape Town for university, I spent months trying to become the person I thought everyone wanted me to be. It wasn’t until I stopped pretending that I found friends who loved the real me.’
Aphiwe
Cape Town
When have you felt most at home – not because of a place, but because you could simply be yourself?
