17/10/2025
The world feels fractured. Racism, hate, prejudice, and fear seep into our collective consciousness, shaping the air we breathe. These are not only external realities, they also live inside us, in ways we may not always recognise.
As I stand beneath a skyline that isn’t mine, I feel the tension of difference in my body. Belonging isn’t always about the ground we stand on, but whether the world makes space for who we are. Identity is often a layering of places, cultures, and histories. To live between them can be enriching, yet it can also bring the disorienting sense of being everywhere and nowhere at once.
When we are “othered,” the wound isn’t confined to the present. It awakens older echoes the silences of our families, the unspoken rules of survival, the inherited fear of never being accepted. These patterns live on in our bodies, both resilient and burdened.
Difference is too often treated as a threat. What sets us apart can invite rejection or violence, yet difference is also where creativity, depth, and new possibilities emerge. To hold it within ourselves and in one another is to resist the forces that fracture us further.
The pain of exclusion touches the most vulnerable parts of us: the child who longed to belong, the adolescent who felt different, the adult still searching for home. These echoes remind us that identity is never fixed; it shifts with the world around us, and is shaken when the world rejects us.
Therapy becomes a space to hold this complexity. A place where fractures can be spoken into wholeness, where grief can be carried safely, where difference is honoured rather than erased. Where identity can be reclaimed not in fragments, but in its full, layered truth allowing us to belong first to ourselves, and then, perhaps, to the world.
