Who Am I?
You cannot answer where you belong until you have answered who you are – and that answer never comes from the mind.
This letter found me on a restless day – the kind where an old question surfaces again: where do I actually belong? I have felt like a guest for most of my life. In groups, in places, in the work I do. Everywhere a little at home, nowhere entirely.
The letter turns the question around. It says that "Where do I belong?" cannot be answered before a deeper one: "Who am I?" – and that this answer doesn't live in the head. In "Coming Alive" we heard Love's invitation to come home to yourself, close enough to feel your own heartbeat. This letter names why that homecoming can take so long: you cannot arrive as long as you don't know who is arriving.
If you know the feeling of standing beside your own life, this one is for you.
Dear traveler,
How you sit there. Restless, anxious, disappointed. Cut off. Without access. Not landed in this world. At least that is how it feels. You ask yourself: Where are my roots? Where am I at home? Where can I feel safe and held? Where can I breathe out and come to rest? Perhaps your life up to this point has been restless. Always searching. Never finding. Always on the move, never arriving. Everywhere, but nowhere at home. You have never spoken the language of the others. Felt understood by only a handful of people. And even with them, you were often "wrong."
This not-belonging is the source of your hopelessness. Perhaps it has been with you all your life. Perhaps you were always a stranger, even as a child. You practice a profession and still don't have the feeling that you are that profession. You live in a country, but you are not from there. You move somewhere else – and you don't belong there either. The question "Where do I belong?" presupposes the answer to "Who am I?" It is an existential question. Only when you find an answer to this question can you "arrive." And the answer is not in the head. Not rational. Ask your heart. Ask your intuition. Your essence. Who am I?
Thank you for being here.
If something in these letters stayed with you, take it along – think about it, write your own answer, or just let it sit.
And if not today, that's okay too. There's no rush.
Until next time,
– Jan