The Edge of Belonging

“You only are free when you realise you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great. […] I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that.”

— Maya Angelou

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I arrived just as everyone was getting ready for the first meeting. Most of the other women had been there for a while — settled, greeted, already finding their feet. I grabbed a name tag, scanned a piece of paper for instructions, and slipped into the flow of things.

No ceremony. No moment of welcome. And yet, somewhere between the car park and that first meeting, something in me knew: I belong here.

This was my first weekend as a staff member with Woman Within, the international women’s community whose work I wrote about the year before last. I’d attended my own transformational weekend in April 2024, completed a Level 2 training just three months later — in this very venue, almost to the day — and then, life being what it is, I’d stepped away for nearly two years. No drama. No rupture. Simply the ebb of things.

And yet the moment I stepped back in, I felt completely at home.

Not because nothing had changed. Not because I knew everyone. But because I had made a decision — quietly, before I even left the house — that I belonged there.

Photo by Serafin Reyna on Unsplash

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The lifelong edge

For most of my life, I have lived on the edge of things.

Not outside — never quite outside. But not fully in either. Always that slight distance, that feeling of watching from just beyond the circle’s warmth. As a French woman who chose to make her life in England, I wore my outsider status lightly, even enjoyed it. There was freedom in it. A certain clarity of perspective that comes from never being fully absorbed.

But then Brexit happened, and the comfortable ambiguity I’d built my identity around collapsed almost overnight. Suddenly I was too English for France and too French for England. The in-between place I’d called home — that had always been home — simply vanished. And for the first time, not belonging felt less like a choice and more like a wound.

It took years of inner work to understand the difference.

What I eventually came to see was that underneath the pleasurable outsider identity was something older and less conscious: an avoidant pattern, a fear of full attachment, a way of keeping one foot out the door so I couldn’t be surprised by disappointment. Not belonging as protection. The edge as armour.

But a couple of years ago, I heard something that would transform that perspective.

Photo by Chris on Unsplash