When You Feel You Don’t Belong
Finding Home by leaving Home
Original photo, “Tofino Trail”
I have lived much of my life just outside the circle. I could hear the laughter of other children and watch the conspiratorial glances that meant belonging, but I stayed at the edge, content to observe. At the family table, love was sometimes warm, sometimes withheld. I learned early to listen more than speak, to read the undercurrents before stepping in. This became my earliest terroir, the ground that shaped me — a mix of beauty and quiet, rich with solitude yet marked by the small stones of uncertainty. It influenced how I reached for light, how I learned to grow, and how I carried myself in the world.
Marion Woodman might have asked me where, in my body, the vanishing began. Where the parts of me that wanted to speak, to risk, to stand open, went underground. She would want me to feel the absence in my body and invite it back into balance with my soul. Years later, in one of her classes when she was my professor in depth psychology, she had us rolling on the floor curled like wood bugs, eyes closed, feeling our spines stretch, then contract, then stretch again. I remember opening my eyes to find hers six inches from mine. We had rolled next to each other without noticing. Her eyes were smiling, pools of welcome, wisdom, warm and steady. In that moment, I felt seen, held, welcomed, found, complete.
As a girl, I placed the ache into quiet places. I buried it in the steady gaze of a horse, in the tide folding into the shore, in the soil under my nails, in the pages of poems. I did well in school, but the praise never felt like home. While my peers plotted careers, I moved through jobs that found me by accident, doors that opened because I carried something unusual: beauty, intellect, a quiet difference.
In between those still seasons came sudden weather. Lovers who were brilliant, beautiful, magnetic. Men who lit a room when they entered and looked at me as if I was the reason. Love felt improbable and inevitable, an intoxicating blend of passion, conversation, and adventure. But the shine never lasted. Underneath was the familiar thread of projection and fantasy, of me serving as the mirror so they could see their own light more brightly.
Margaret Atwood says there should be as many words for love as there are for snow. She was my writing teacher one semester, on an island in Canada, back when she was a newly minted author. I remember the salt air and the sound of gulls outside the classroom windows, a rhythm that seeped into my bones. She was the first teacher to show me where my voice lived, somewhere between my Fort Knox armory and Orion’s Belt. That recognition was a kind of map, not of where I should go, but of the exact latitude and longitude of my own skill. Atwood’s gaze was my second form of feeling found, included, of being seen.
Work followed the same pattern. In corporate rooms, I was the unusual perspective. In academia, the one who asked the question no one else thought to ask. In artistic collaborations, I shifted the tone in ways no one could quite name. Yet I never unpacked my coat. I left before the after-parties. I did not weave the ties that hold people in place. Technology confused me. Business felt harsh. The more the world demanded self-worth worn as armor, the more I returned to my terroir: the wide sea, the animals, the raw earth, the sky that emptied my mind and filled it again. It was the living mixture of experiences, landscapes, and inner weather that shaped me as surely as soil and climate shape a vineyard.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that the creative adult is the child who survived. I survived. But survival is not the same as living. Between jobs, I returned to the scent of salt wind and tomato vines, the winter breath of a horse, the long walks where my thoughts could finally take shape. Between lovers, I returned to the “room of one’s own” Virginia Woolf promised, where I could remember what my voice sounded like without an echo.
Anaïs Nin once said that the day comes when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk to blossom. I am there now. The ambitions of my soul are clear. I want to offer something lasting, something only I can bring. But the outer world runs on a kind of currency I have never quite mastered.
Marion Woodman would say the work is to bring spirit into matter, to live in my body as much as in my mind. For me, that means carrying my internal scope of elements, my full terroir, into the rooms where the world conducts its business. The sea air, the wild fields, the constellations overhead, the deep roots of my creative life — all of it belongs to me now in a way it never has before.
The third moment of being seen came unexpectedly, much later, when I read my work aloud to a small gathering. There was no marquee name in the room, no famous teacher or lover, only a half-circle of listeners who leaned in, not because they wanted something from me, but because they recognized something of themselves in what I spoke. Their eyes told me I belonged there, not because I had earned it, but because I had finally brought all of myself into the room.
Once, finding home was my way of feeling like I belonged. Now, home lives inside me. The call is no longer to search for it, but to stand in it, to let it travel through my words, my choices, my presence. I am called to meet the world in a way that surpasses old fears, to walk into spaces I once avoided, to speak when I once would have stayed silent. It is not about shrinking to fit, nor about bending myself to match the shapes around me. It is about arriving whole, carrying the terroir that shaped me, and offering it freely.
I am still an outlier, but no longer in exile. The task now is not to belong, but to bring what belongs to me into the world, as I find the next path back to a west coast island above the 49th, where salt wind moves through cedar, where tides keep their own counsel, and where the fourth moment of being seen waits, in a room or on a wet trail, in the eyes of those who will know me when we meet, again.
written by Bren Littleton
Original photo, “Tofino Trail”.
Tin Flea Press c 2025