Last night, before I closed my eyes… My mind sent me to that specific scene when I met a girl in the wellness club that I used to participate in. The interesting part was that the mind showed me her eyes. I would definitely say her “grounded eyes”. It caught my attention for a second, and I decided to ask ChatGPT about it.
And there is this one answer that really made something inside me go from ember to constellation. It is about that belonging. That word has seen the rawest inside of me that I never knew I needed for most of my entire life. That single word was able to recognise the unspoken soul that I never knew I had with me all along, that’s been waiting for me to be unleashed from the bottom of my heart. It made me open those old memories that still had their claws in my nervous system when I was in kindergarten, middle school, high school, and university, until now. It was something that I had never really experienced the way I wanted it to be. Maybe I knew what it was because I grew up without it.
Welcome to one of my rawest episodes, transmitted from a version of me that finally stopped negotiating with reality. 🎞️
A little background about myself: I grew up in Indonesia and was raised by my nanny for most of my life. I have amazing parents who worked really hard to be able to provide us with that comfort and privilege to not really worry about “life” rather than “living” comfortably. Since I was in kindergarten, I noticed myself wondering what it feels like to be able to experience the feeling of when my parents picked me from school, helped me passionately with my homework, having enough space for me to be able to rant about my life, and teach me how to stand up for myself when something I didn’t want happened to me… All those things… I wondered what it would feel like. Until that specific moment got me curious, and I couldn’t catch it right after that “belong” word appeared; all those pictures of humans and memories showered me like the universe dumping an entire archive into my nervous system.
It sent me back through earlier chapters where friendships bloomed quickly and quietly withered, not because the connection failed, but because authenticity never got to enter the room. I realised the exhaustion came from never starting as my truest self. I was losing the energy required to perform. I didn’t know I had been holding my breath for years until today, when I finally exhaled as my real self. Everything felt lighter, quieter, almost newly possible.
When life scripts you instead of you scripting yourself, you become a character designed for other people’s plots, and suddenly you’re living scenes you never consented to. I think that when you can show up as your authentic version of yourself, you will naturally be able to see what is truly meant for you and be able to metabolise everything rather than being in constant battle between your authentic self vs. performance self. And the only thing you are is your unarmoured self by building that muscle of taking that one “courage” action that you never thought you would be able to do, and just see how it goes. When you start creating a new muscle of courageous action of yours, you naturally will create this version of yourself that exists without any permission. You will eventually bloom into someone that you are proud of. And one day, you realise that everything that is happening through you shapes you to become someone who could stay fully present inside their own story.
I like the part that he said, “It’s how you live.” It means how intently you live your life by using your internal voice. Internal conversation is my number one favourite thing to do in my daily life. The truth is, the only thing you need to care about is “NOW” and how it wants to be represented by that reality. Your emotions are the secret key to telling the reality of how you’ve wanted your life to go. As Neville Goddard said, "Every feeling makes a subconscious impression, and the dominant of two feelings is the one expressed. " When I started to entertain what I felt more than anything, life stopped feeling random and started feeling addressed to you. You will most likely find something that you want as an obvious thing to have, rather than nagging. You will find that your thoughts and emotions that you put in will lead you to an aligned action of what you’ve intentionally created for yourself. Life starts cooperating with you rather than working against you. You’ll find yourself in a reality where things keep working out, and living stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like anticipation.
What I’ve learned through this journey is that life isn’t about making everything perfect or hanging your happiness on a single defining event. It’s something you are inside of every second, something you experience rather than complete. Life was never about a destination. It’s about learning, failing, loving, breaking, healing, travelling to places that move you, and collecting moments that don’t fit neatly into any single narrative. Reality is messy, enormous, and far too alive to be reduced to one outcome. And maybe that’s all belonging ever was: not a place, not a person, but the moment you stop abandoning yourself. Nothing about life suddenly becomes tidy or resolved. It just becomes yours. And for the first time, that feels like enough. And I’m beginning to see, it’s not something you arrive at once and keep forever. It’s something you practise every time you choose not to leave yourself. And for the first time, that feels less like a question and more like an answer.
Your Subconscious Bestie,
Liona
