11/11/2025
I used to envy those who grew up with a strong sense of place and belonging. How easily their identities were tied to the soil they walked on. How their mannerisms and accents were just another thread in a tapestry of the landscape, the town’s history and the people they grew up with.
Growing up as a mixed race child in a small Australian town hours away from any real big city (and the diversity that came with it), all those small cues that signalled belonging, affinity, inclusion, worn like a second skin by my childhood friends, always felt so slightly out of reach for me.
But I was a child then, and that restless search for belonging was magnified by the innocence and naivety of childhood, and I guess, by the constant habit of looking to grown-ups and those around us for permission.
Now, years later, I have realised that belonging, as a migrant, is not something you have to wait to be given. You can build it yourself. And your sense of place can grow with the land you choose to love. It took a long time to get here. Truthfully, I’ve done a lot of reading, digesting books about the diaspora perspective, listening to audibles about empire, and unpacking discussions on race and privilege and movement. And while all that reading and listening did not exactly hand me a map or give me tidy answers, it did give me a language, and with it the confidence to build my own sense of belonging without anyone else’s permission. So I will keep building, and in the work of building I will belong.
