The difference between fitting in and standing in your truth.
For much of my life, I learned how to fit in.
I became what was needed.
Polite enough.
Capable enough.
Not too loud. Not too soft.
Just enough to be accepted—never too much to be questioned.
Fitting in is a survival skill.
It keeps you safe in unfamiliar rooms.
It gets you a seat at the table—but often at the cost of your own voice.
And here’s the truth I’ve come to realise:
Fitting in is not belonging.
Belonging doesn’t ask you to edit yourself.
It doesn’t require performance.
It doesn’t shrink you or shape you to match someone else’s comfort.
True belonging begins with standing in your truth—whether or not others understand it.
It begins when you return to yourself.
To your whenua.
To your reo, even if you’re still learning it.
To your whakapapa, even if the line is broken in places.
Belonging is ancestral. It’s spiritual.
It’s that quiet knowing that says:
“I am not lost. I am home. Even if no one else sees it yet.”
Belonging is when you show up in a space and your full self is not only welcomed—but needed.
It’s when your lived experience doesn’t make you an outsider,
but a taonga—
a bearer of knowledge, of perspective, of power.
I used to think I had to prove myself.
Now I know I just have to be myself.
Because the spaces that honour who I am without condition are the only ones worth staying in.
And when we start creating those spaces for ourselves,
We become that belonging for others.
We become the soft place, the safe place, the real place.
So this is my invitation:
Don’t keep contorting yourself to fit into spaces that were never made for your truth.
Instead, make space for your own voice, your own shape, your own whakapapa.
Stand in your truth.
That is where you truly belong.
—
To the wāhine, the carers, the seekers: may you always remember—your belonging begins with you.
And when you honour that, you give others permission to do the same.