FROM OUR FOUNDER
A note from Felicia on belonging, and the parts of ourselves we learn to hide.
There is a kind of loneliness that only happens in full rooms.
You are there. You are welcome. People are glad you came. And somewhere underneath all of that, you feel the quiet ache of not being fully present, because the person they are glad to see is not entirely you. It is a careful version. One you assembled on the way over.
I know this feeling from the inside. I lived in it for years without a name for it.
It began the way it begins for most of us. Somewhere early, I learned that the whole of me was slightly too much for the space I was in. Too loud, too quick, too certain, too visible. Nobody said it cruelly. It arrived in small ways. A glance held a second too long. Laughter that stopped a beat before mine did. The particular silence that follows a woman who has just said exactly what she thinks.
So I adjusted. I was good at it. I learned to read a room before I entered it and decide what would be allowed in. The opinion became a question. The joy became composure. The certainty became something softer and more forgivable. And it worked, which is the hardest part to admit. I was liked. I was kept. I belonged to every room and to none of them.
What I want to say to you is this. That instinct to edit yourself was never a weakness. It was intelligence. You noticed what the world rewarded and you gave it what it asked for. That is what a thinking person does when she wants to stay safe. But there comes a point where safety stops protecting you and starts costing you, and the cost is your own company. You lose the experience of being somewhere as yourself.
I think many women reach that point quietly, in their late twenties or thirties, and mistake it for tiredness. It is not tiredness. It is grief. You are mourning the version of yourself you kept leaving outside.
Here is what I have come to understand, slowly and at some expense.
Fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, though they feel similar from a distance. Fitting in is when you change so that the room can accept you. Belonging is when you arrive whole and the room can hold you. One asks you to pay, every time, with pieces of yourself. The other asks nothing, because there is nothing to hide.And belonging is not something you earn. I used to believe it was. I thought if I did enough, softened enough, proved enough, I would eventually be let in. But you were whole before you learned to trim yourself. Belonging is not a place you reach. It is a place you return to.
When I began returning, not everyone came with me. Some people had grown attached to the easier version and had little use for the full one. I will not pretend that did not hurt. It did, deeply. But something else happened alongside the loss. The people who stayed drew closer.
Conversations went further than they ever had. I stopped leaving rooms feeling as though I had performed, and started leaving them feeling as though I had actually been there. That is the trade. It is not a small one, but it is the right one.
I still catch myself editing. Usually in rooms I want something from. The difference now is that I feel it happen, and I get to decide. Most of the time I choose to stay whole. Sometimes I do not, and I forgive myself for it. This is not a transformation. It is a practice, and it is quiet, and it takes a lifetime.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself, I want to leave you with one thing only.
The next time you walk into a room, notice what you leave at the door. Do not force it in. Just look at it, and let yourself see how much of you it is. That seeing is the beginning. Once you know what you have been holding back, you cannot unknow it, and it will slowly become harder to keep holding.
The version of you that laughs too easily, cares too much, speaks before she is invited to. She was never too much. She was only ever in rooms that were too small for her.
This is what we are trying to build here. Rooms that are big enough.
Come as you are. Ryse as you are.
Felicia
