The first home

When did I begin to leave?
When did I begin the slow departure from the first home I ever had?
Not from a place. From this body.

I can find some of the moments, if I look. The first time my dance partner's mom commented on my size in a way that lodged somewhere I couldn't reach. The way I learned, across years, to negotiate my presence in certain rooms - a little smaller here, a little quieter there, a little bolder and extravagant there. Doctor visits that spoke about my body as a system to be managed. The images that arrive constantly, informing me what a woman's body should look like, should become, should apologize for.

Nobody declared an exile. It happened in increments.

This question came back to me after listening while editing two recent conversations I had on YINtentions with Robyn and with Anca. Two women, entirely different lives. And both of them, each in their own way, finding their way back to the same threshold.

Robyn walked away from everything she had built. Studio, team, title, the identity she'd spent years constructing. At the bottom with a visa at risk, bank account frightening - a coach told her to stop. Not to fix anything. But to let her nervous system come out of fight or flight. To find safety inside before trying to rebuild anything outside. And from there, slowly, a return to the body. Hands on hips. Meeting herself. Not healing — arriving.

Anca had moved through the world primarily in the mind. Systems, patterns, the intelligence beneath complexity. Her exile has been quieter, if you would, belonging through being perceived a certain way, looking the part, carrying her knowledge like armor and entry card at once.

Different shapes of the same departure.

Belonging - the word we reach for when describing what we want from community, from love, from the world - what if it begins somewhere else entirely? What if the longing we project outward is asking an earlier, more intimate question?

What if I belong within this body?

Sonya Renee Taylor (author of My Body is Not an Apology - highly recommend!) asks: why are we consistently apologizing for the space we inhabit? What if we understood the inherent vastness of our humanity and therefore occupied the world without apology?

And she names the other side of it too. How body shame turns outward. The way we find ourselves picking apart other bodies, consuming them for the sake of our own fragile sense of self. Saying nothing when cruel things are said. Participating, quietly, in the same exile we're living inside.

The world keeps calling us out of ourselves. Medical conversations. The images. The comments that lodge somewhere before we've even processed them. The ongoing invitation to manage, correct, apologize.

How do I keep returning home through all of that?

That's the question I'm holding, inquiring, experimenting with.

I heard it underneath both conversations. In Robyn learning to put her hands on her hips with something approaching tenderness. In Anca learning to listen to the system within.

Both women discovering, in entirely different ways, that belonging has an address they hadn't yet tried.

The inside.

Robyn's episode is here. Listen anywhere you listen to podcasts.

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I've been in this question a long time. Some days the return feels close. Others, I'm three steps out the door before I notice.

That's where I am with it. Where are you? Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.

with bliss and intention,

Anna Teresa