---
title: "On Belonging"
description: "You only are free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all."
url: "https://blog.gatsbydai.com/on-belonging"
published: "2023-11-06T07:23:00Z"
updated: "2023-11-06T23:54:53Z"
authors: ["Xiaojun Dai"]
---

# On Belonging

You only are free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all.

![](https://blog.gatsbydai.com/assets/uploads/4de6488ed05f788d5834b48ce4ad8080.jpg)

As a lifelong traveler, I often wonder where I belong.

As I have slowly built up my life in San Francisco and carefully (and flexibly) reinvented my identity among the cross-culture, racial, and spiritual experiences, a similar question keeps surfacing— Who am I?

In an interview with Bill Moyers in 1973, Maya Angelou said, "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."

Decades later, Brené Brown once said something very similar, “I feel I belong everywhere I go, no matter where it is or who I’m with as long as I never betray myself. And the minute I become who you want me to be in order to fit in and make sure people like me is the moment I no longer belong anywhere.”

I would love to call it the life of "in-between" — between body and mind, heart and brain, different cultures and religions, and between suffering and awakening.

In any therapeutic work, I believe one primary goal of the therapist is to instill the concept of the "Self" within the client's conscious awareness. - How do *I* feel? What is *my* unique experience in this world? What are *my* true desires and needs? How do *I* look at *myself*? (Often, when our authentic"Self" feels diminished, the *ego* steps forward to defend her - I need to please to be liked. I need to achieve higher to be seen. I need to speak louder to be heard ... but the case is precisely the opposite - behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness.)

I belong to myself. And I’m very proud of that.