Belonging Nowhere Is To Belong Everywhere

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great…”

~ Maya Angelou

Belonging nowhere used to really bother me. Seeking my identity was complicated. I didn’t quite fit into my family, nor did I fit in with my friends. I didn’t fit in the towns where I was raised, or the communities my family chose to become part of.

My adoptive culture saw me differently than I saw myself, and my birth culture wanted nothing to do with me. But for all the searching and all the struggles I put myself through in hopes of finding belonging, I always came up short.

I wasn’t Korean. I was too adopted.

I wasn’t Asian American. I was too Swedish.

I wasn’t “American.” I was too Asian.

Turns out I was even an enigma while living and traveling through Asia. People would assume I was a local and simply begin speaking to me in Korean, Japanese, Nepali, even Vietnamese. The only other explanation they could comprehend, if I wasn’t a local was that I was a tourist from Korea, Japan, Nepal, or Vietnam, but certainly not American. The shock written across their faces when I spoke perfect English was priceless.

“Oh, your English is very good!”

My adoptive family wasn’t the problem. My small mill town by the sea wasn’t even the issue. The world over, I was confusing. It didn’t matter. After you’ve been told enough times that you don’t fit, in as many countries in as many languages as I have, it stops being insulting, and simply becomes normal.

Somewhere around the time I went to graduate school, belonging to some collective, some group, that was identifiable and verified by some external force, stopped being important to me. It wasn’t about rejecting society or wearing a big chip on my shoulder. It was about ending my rejection of myself.

I don’t fit any labels.

To be fair, I don’t know how many of us actually do. No prefabricated boxes are the right shape or size for my unique brand of self. From the outside one could make loads of assumptions about my heritage, my beliefs, where I live, even the types of food I buy in the produce section. Trust me. Every assumption that could be made about me has been made about me, overtly and explicitly, and not just from strangers.



The truth is, it used to really bother me. My face would turn bright red, my hands would get all clammy and I’d spend way too much of my energy trying to explain the complexity that existed within me, while also trying to not offend anyone. Most of the time, I’d end up apologizing for confusing them with my unconventional background.

Do you know what’s exhausting? Smiling patiently at people as they grapple with my identity for me.

At some point, I was done trying. It wasn’t worth explaining myself every time I was at the grocery store or walking down the street, only to feel a need to apologize for being “difficult” to label. So I stop apologizing, and I stopped caring so much about painting an accurate picture of myself to every person that asked me. It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t need to validate my belonging or clarify my belonging to anyone other than myself.

Belonging means different things to different people, but the feeling we get from that sense of belonging is the same. It’s like a security blanket that wards off the monsters in the closet. It’s like that mentor who always had time to hear our latest harebrained idea. It’s like coming home to a loving family who’s affection for you is unwavering.

Belonging doesn’t need to be a box.

It doesn’t need to have labels or external indicators that validate or announce who you are and where you belong. It can feel good to have such a recognizable box to point at and say, “this is me.” But it’s far from necessary.

My quest for belonging has been a long and tumultuous journey, and it’s far from over. But more and more I find it from within. Housed in my body, nurtured by my intuition, my belonging is not something that can be taken away from me, or defined by anyone but me. It’s not a place or a community. It’s simply, me.

As my life’s progressed, I’ve lost my drive to seek belonging outside myself. It’s a young person’s game and I can no longer claim to be young. But my quest was not in vain. My drive to seek a group or community, a country or family, where I felt seen and understood may have waned. But my understanding of true belonging, the kind that Maya Angelou spoke so eloquently about, has now aged like a fine wine.


To seek myself in a label was never going to satiate my desire to belong. In truth, the only place any of us can belong is within. It can be a slow and painful journey, but it’s worth every bruise. In hindsight, I guess you could say that we’d all benefit from the discovery that belonging comes from within, even if it ends up being a roundabout journey back to ourselves again and again.