It’s Scorpio season, and here we are. The same wound, ancestral and stubborn, shows up again.
I’m so tired of this wound that I don’t even know how to write about it without kind of laughing at myself, but here it is:
I am convinced that I do not belong.
Sigh. Damn.
But there is a plot twist this time around y’all.
Because no, I am not here to suffer and yes, I do demand from myselves that my healing doesn’t look like stupid circles. My healing needs to look like widening circles.
Healing isn’t linear — and while I often revisit the same pain or pattern again and again, each time I return, I do so with a little more awareness, compassion, and somatic capacity.
So instead of going in closed loops (repeating the same wound unconsciously), I move in widening circles — spiraling outward. The wound might still be at the center, but I orbit it with more perspective, spaciousness, and self-trust each time. What does healing feel like, somatically, for you? I am curious.
One trap I’ve consistently faced while widening these healing circles is political bypassing:
Political bypassing happens when we use politics to avoid intimacy. When analysis becomes armor, we end up hiding behind theory instead of showing up in relationship. We name systems (“that’s just patriarchy,” “that’s your conditioning”) instead of naming how we actually feel. It’s similar to spiritual bypassing, where spiritual language or practices are used to sidestep pain or accountability — but in this case, it happens through politics.
We perform accountability instead of practicing it. We stay in our heads instead of our bodies. Political bypassing replaces vulnerability with ideology —it makes us sound aware while keeping us disconnected. True liberation work asks us to bring our politics into our nervous systems, our conflicts, our care — not use them to escape.
But… I have done that.
Here’s how I’ve traced this journey in myself:
Phase 1: Personalization (the “it’s all my fault” phase)
It hurt and I knew (somatically) that something was wrong, but no one around me named it.
During this phase, I carried a lot of shame and felt isolated. The common misconception we hold in our bodies at this stage is: “If only I heal enough, then I’ll be ready for relationships.” As if belonging is something to earn, rather than a practice ground where we learn, stumble, and evolve alongside others.
Phase 2: Politicization (the “it’s not just me” phase)
Finding people who named my experiences transformed the ‘I’ into ‘we’. I realized it wasn’t just me — I am not crazy, I am not too sensitive, actually, Y’ALL ARE. I could finally name what was happening to me. It was racism, it was sexism, it was classism, it was queerphobia, it was transphobia. My pain became shared and recognized, and for the first time, I felt like I could belong. The ‘I’ began to take the shape of ‘we’.
In this phase of my life, I remember feeling so much expansion and even ecstasy came with that political clarity.
However, “it’s not me” was incomplete. It’s not just me was closer to the truth. The systems are also inside me. I think it took me a while to get there because I was scared of the other question that would inevitably surface once I realized a big part of the issue lived inside me:
How do we dismantle the Empire within when we feel so broken inside?
This place was the birthplace of the third one, the one of Political Bypassing.
Phase 3: Political Bypassing (the “system explains everything” phase)
Down the line, in organising spaces or in spaces in which we were gathered based on identity only, I often felt another kind of dissonance. There, everything was structural. Every wound, every ache, every fracture in a life was laid at the feet of the system. My body resisted that too. It didn’t feel right to collapse all pain into politics, to erase the fragile mystery of our inner worlds. Worse, this belief was also misused to evade all sorts of personal accountability. I thought I could rest my head on identity for a moment to find belonging, but I had forgotten that identity is built on separation—including from ourselves. The box felt too small for my multitudes, and in spaces like that, I also overlooked the multitudes others carried. I felt rigid, hyper-vigilant, and moralizing.
In other words, I was not fun y’all. Berlin taught me how to judge instead of understand. I found us so emotionally detached, and it scared me. That detachment often wore the mask of political clarity. Accountability became theoretical, and compassion conditional. I was miserable. I trusted no one. Every time I was in spaces, I was out with my knife wondering when I’d be attacked next. I was terrified to make mistakes, to use the wrong pronouns, to say something awkward. In other words, I became terrified to be human.
Phase 4: Integration (the “it’s both personal and political” phase)
I began reconnecting emotional honesty with political clarity. Deep in my body, I knew the greatest initiation — composting these systems and birthing something new in ourselves — isn’t found in ceremony, but in radical self-honesty. My feelings matter, yes, AND they’re shaped by the world I live in. Here I found nuance and complexity. Unlike spaces ruled by black-and-white thinking, I discovered discomfort in the grey… and richness within it, too. “The ‘we’ began to take the shape of ‘us’.
Phase 5: Embodiment (or the “conflict is intimacy” phase)
I understood that the personal is political BUT, I want to go deeper. I want to live the political through the personal. I am done dying for a dream that isn’t coming. I want to LIVE for a reality I am building with you. My dream was immature, and letting it go meant grieving how much the world has stripped me of any kind of innocence. I know there is privilege in holding onto innocence, and yes, my political self judges me writing this. They’re like: “Do you think the Congolese kids mining minerals had the privilege of innocence, CAREE??? HMMMM???”
I KNOW. I just wish innocence wasn’t a privilege in this world.
I also know that the huge amount of unprocessed grief we all carry in our bodies is the reason why we are here now. So I’ll grieve.
The only question left is: “Okay, this is the world you live in. You can disagree — that’s the very least you could do — but what are you actually doing about it now?”
The best thing I’ve found so far, beyond sharing, giving, voting with my euro, signing, showing up, and grieving, is living my political values through the personal. Centering repair as practice, not performance or value signaling. This place is responsive, connected, and fluid.
I know liberation begins with how I relate — to myselves, to you, to the land. I find myself in this weird contradiction: as this dumpster-fire world gets worse, I am happier. Not a happiness you can quantify or even see. My knees are weak, y’all, and I am NOT washing my hair every week. I let that go.
But my practice is rooted in belonging, and because of that, it becomes sustainable. I guess I am content. I feel in complete integrity with what I believe and what I practice. I am far from perfect, but I really want to try. I want to practice with people who are interested in trying, too. And it is in that practice that I find my belonging, with you.
That’s what Liberation Practice Field is all about.
We’ve gone through this whole cycle over and over and now we’ve finally landed in this Phase 5 where we want to practice our values, build each other up instead of judging each other for what we’re missing.
Ok- back to my belonging wound and the plot twist.
This time, I realized my healing wouldn’t come from my mind figuring it out for me. My wound of feeling like I don’t belong has nothing to do with me—but it left me with the behavioral pattern of someone convinced they don’t belong.
I really understood it in Berlin.
Berlin is the place for misfits. People come from everywhere, and even the most privileged among us choose to go there because, deep down, we’ve always felt out of place. The first year—the honeymoon phase—is special. Nobody cares. Nobody cares that we’re odd. Maybe we’re not even odd enough. Nobody cares that we’re the queer one. Queering your politics is the bare minimum.
But after a year, the same conclusion hits: nobody cares. No one cares. Fuck. And you can’t even be mad—they’re not your parents. Fuck. Fuck.
How can we expect people who’ve never practiced belonging to belong to one another?
If you’ve struggled to make long-term friends in Berlin, I’ve been you. I grew tired of saying goodbye. Tired of the party conversations about leaving—where to? When? Don’t know! We all just knew this wasn’t it. Berlin was built on sand. Rooting in sand is no small feat.
I don’t carry the behavioral patterns of someone who’s long practiced belonging. I have to learn it all over again. How? I don’t know yet—but I’ll keep you posted. If you have any leads, let me know in the comments ! Maybe putting our minds, bodies and hearts to it will bring us better questions we never thought of before.
For now, here’s what I’ve noticed in myself (it’s ew so take a breath!)
Because my deepest wound is not belonging, I’ve built a million coping mechanisms just to survive. I’ve exercised them so long I started to confuse them for identity. (Red flag!)
I’ve become hyper-independent.
I don’t rely on asking for help. Ghosted by a lover, flaky friends—it all reinforced it.
I’ve even taken pride in being this way. (What the fuck!)
So when someone comes offering belonging, those identities feel threatened. I feel threatened. I’m not even sure who I am outside of them. (Eww! L-O-L !)
I recoil. I say, “No thanks.” The body recognizes what’s familiar, and familiar isn’t always good for us. Familiarity masquerades as safety. By recoiling, I reinforce the wound. I’d rather be right and alone than wrong and in community (will need to touch grass after that !)
Again and again, I remind myself:
healing means losing the identity I built around my wounds.
The wound of belonging probably never fully heals. Maybe reconciliation isn’t about fixing it—it’s about accepting that you won’t reconcile with that. It hurts to know that the people who brought me here carried that in their bodies too, and although they did the best they could, they still pass it down.
But I am not a child anymore, I can’t be abandoned. And I am tired of doing what my parents have done over and over: abandoning me ! Do you see how it all feeds itself ?
I’ve decided to lay this wound to rest for a while. She’s been working too hard.
And honestly? I’m excited for the space those old identities leave behind. That’s the beautiful part of healing: we get to decide who we want to become once we’ve made room.
I would love to witness you shed those identities you’re tired of in Liberation Practice Field. If any of this speaks to you, we’d love for you to join us.
Sending big care your way,
Care