We Were Never Meant to Fit Their Frame
Part 2: A Movement Toward Hope, Belonging, Connection, Peace, and Love
(guided by the voices within, and between, us)
HOPE
“The Voice That Never Fully Left”
An emergence from beneath the conditioning
There is warmth in the air.
Not much—
but enough to soften what was frozen.
Something stirs
where stillness held for years:
not a roar,
a ripple.
Not a declaration,
a question:
“Could this be the beginning of something else?”
Hope listens.
It does not hurry.
It touches the soil
and asks what might grow here
if we stop asking what is allowed.
Hope remembers
how often we mistook control for safety,
how deeply we were taught to override our own clarity
to please, to prove, to belong.
Yet here it is—
arriving anyway.
Hope sees difference
not as error,
but as invitation.
It draws no straight lines,
only circles.
It opens room
for questions with no immediate answers:
☐ “What does enough feel like?”
☐ “How do I move with compassion—for others, and for myself?”
☐ “What if love is not a prize, but a practice?”
Hope walks with Ubuntu.
It speaks from inter-being.
It reflects:
“I am because you are.”
“We are because we choose to be.”
It does not isolate;
it integrates.
Hope is not waiting for permission.
It is already weaving
through cracks in old systems,
planting questions in places
where only rules once grew.
It is soft and rooted.
It is not interested in applause—
only presence.
You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are not alone.
You are here,
and that is already
an opening.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 🩵🤍🩷 🤎🖤 💛🤍💜🖤
BELONGING
“I Am Still Here: A Rewilding”
a living document, a sensory interruption, a refusal to disappear
[Field Note / Fragment / Body Check]
‣ my jaw is tight.
‣ I don’t remember what I was about to say.
‣ someone called it “just small talk” but it scraped.
‣ I smiled. I vanished. again.
I’ve been included in rooms where I erased myself to stay.
I’ve smiled through hollow conversations while my nervous system whispered,
“Get out. Get out. Get out.”
This isn’t about fitting in.
Fitting was always a form of disappearance.
{ Marginalia from a memory I never gave words: }
"fit in or else."
"look normal."
"stop asking so many questions."
"they won’t like you if—"
—if I what?
if I breathe out loud?
I do not belong to systems that reward silence.
I do not belong to cultures that call survival professionalism.
I do not belong to the versions of myself I contorted into
just to be allowed to stay.
I belong
to the one who watched me leave
and waited for me to come back.
↯ Inquiry:
where do I go
when I leave my body
to survive this conversation?
≡ Excerpt from the Book of Invisible Rules:
Rule
Translation
“Be yourself.” ← → Be a version we recognize.
“You’re welcome here.” ← → As long as you don’t disrupt.
“We’re all human.” ← → So don’t mention the difference.
“Just say what you mean.” ← → Unless it’s hard to hear.
✐ Footnote:
I have been speaking clearly.
You just don’t listen to my frequency.
[Quote, misfiled in a corporate DEI handbook]
“Inclusion is being invited to the party.
Belonging is dancing like no one’s watching.”
And yet:
There’s a mirror on every wall.
The lights are too bright.
Someone’s counting the steps.
And I was never taught the music.
[Somatic Reminder:]
☐ breath is not permission
☐ breath is not politeness
☐ breath is reclamation
☐ breath is presence
☐ breath is practice
Belonging is rewilding.
It is what grows
when I stop weeding out the parts of me
they said were too much,
too strange,
too raw.
It is not a feeling.
It is a decision—
repeated in the presence of fear
and the absence of applause.
[Imagined Dialogue Between My Nervous System and a Roomful of Unsaid Things]
— Can I stay here, as I am?
— Will you leave if I don’t change?
— What do you need me to not be in order to feel safe?
✶ I don’t shrink anymore just to make the silence more comfortable.
[Re-rooting / Present Tense Practice]
I notice:
My breath.
My weight against the floor.
The stories I’m still carrying that aren’t mine.
The silence I was taught to keep.
The voice that whispers—still—“You are allowed to be.”
What I think, I create.
So I think slowly.
So I ask clearly.
So I listen before speaking—not out of politeness, but presence.
What I feel, I attract.
So I feel on purpose.
So I stop numbing.
So I allow myself the full range, even if no one else does.
What I imagine, I become.
So I imagine a life that doesn’t start with an apology.
There is a wildness in me
that never agreed to be domesticated.
It was trained to behave.
It learned to survive.
But it never stopped knowing
how to return.
✎ I am not looking for a place to fit.
✎ I am learning to remain.
✎ I am still here.
✎ And that is already
a rewilding.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 🩵🤍🩷 🤎🖤 💛🤍💜🖤
PEACE & FREEDOM
“We Begin Again, Without Their Rules”
a field guide for rewilding relationship, one breath at a time
[Opening Field Note / Refusal / Declaration]
I will not perform civility
for a system that confuses silence with peace.
I will not contort my being
to remain palatable to institutions
designed to extract, dominate, divide.
I was not born to repeat
what harmed the ones before me.
Peace is not the absence of tension.
Peace is the presence of truth.
Freedom is not an individual possession.
It is a relational state:
I am free when I do not need to erase you
to feel safe being me.
[Diagram, reimagined]
Old Mode (on the way to the archives)l:
Command ↔ Obedience
Hierarchy ↔ Compliance
Scarcity ↔ Performance
New Pattern (still forming):
Listening ↔ Presence
Compassion ↔ Curiosity
Power-with ↔ Collaboration
Difference ↔ Expansion
This is not theoretical.
This is felt in how I enter the room.
In whether I speak to win,
or to connect.
In whether I respond with assumption,
or with breath.
[Nonviolence is not passivity.]
Nonviolence is the bold act
of not replicating what broke us.
It is the work of meeting force with clarity,
meeting fear with grounded presence,
meeting misunderstanding with enough space
for something else to emerge.
[The Four Immeasurables—Practiced, Not Preached]
☐ Metta – Loving-kindness
☐ Karuna – Compassion for suffering
☐ Mudita – Joy in others’ joy
☐ Upekkha – Equanimity in complexity
Not values to display.
Practices to return to
in conflict, in conversation, in community.
[Inter-being: A Thought in Motion]
I do not end at my skin.
I am breath I did not invent,
language I inherited,
soil I walk on.
I am because you are.
We are because we choose to be.
Everything I say shapes the world we live in.
Everything I withhold, too.
[The New Conditions of Engagement]
✎ Do I speak from fear, or from care?
✎ Do I ask to understand, or to affirm myself?
✎ Can I hold complexity without collapsing into control?
✎ Am I building with you, or reacting against you?
[Outward Mindset is not strategy—it is surrender to interconnection]
When I see you as a person,
not a problem,
we meet.
When I see myself as part of a field,
not a solo act,
I soften.
When I remember we were never meant to win against each other,
but to witness, and shape together—
we begin again.
[Closing Refrain / Soft Instructions]
Speak clearly.
But not to dominate.
Listen wholly.
But not to disappear.
Pause often.
Let presence replace reaction.
Leave the old rules behind.
Let them rot back into the earth.
They have done enough harm.
We do not owe them our repetition.
Peace is not a place we find.
It is a form we practice.
Freedom is not a prize.
It is a rhythm we remember.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 🩵🤍🩷 🤎🖤 💛🤍💜🖤
LOVE
“The Ocean When the Wind Has Gone Quiet”
heart, mind, and soul in conversation
This is the voice of integration.
Every part of me welcomed.
Every thread woven.
Every silence met with warmth.
Love moves like water—
steady, clear, unafraid of depth.
It arrives in rhythm,
in breath,
in the spaces between words,
where truth lives without needing to be explained.
Love listens.
Love receives.
Love expands.
Love mirrors.
It holds kindness in its gaze.
It speaks with compassion’s cadence.
It glows with joy that celebrates.
It rests in stillness wide enough for every truth to breathe.
In this space,
I walk without hiding.
I speak without armor.
I meet you as I am—whole,
and welcome.
Love surrounds.
Love includes.
Love remembers everything,
and carries it with tenderness.
There is harmony here—
heart, mind, soul
in conversation,
in rhythm,
in trust.
Love creates the shape of peace.
Love moves with the pulse of freedom.
Love invites every being back into belonging.
I open.
I stay.
I offer.
I receive.
I witness.
I become.
This is the calm ocean,
reflecting sky and face and future.
This is the song we carry inside us,
the one we hum when we are alone
and ready.
This is love—
and it is all here.
Now.
Always.
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Thank you for walking this path beside me.
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