Where I'm Local: A Journey Through Belonging

The Geography of the Soul

The question of where I am from has always felt like an impossibly small container for the life I have lived. It is not because I do not know the places I have called home, but because none of them, on their own, can hold the truth of who I am.

My upbringing was never a straight line. By the age of sixteen, I was paying rent and figuring out a world I was not yet ready to navigate alone. I lived in a room in a house full of strangers, being independent because I had to be, not because I chose to be. Yet, even then, a constellation of homes began to form around me. My father did what he could, and my best friend’s parents stepped in with a quiet, steady love that still makes my throat catch today. I belonged everywhere and nowhere at once, and perhaps that is why the idea of belonging has always felt so tender and so slippery to me.

I grew up in the hum of North American urgency, a culture that demands we always be achieving, producing, and proving. It is a place where rest is viewed with suspicion and slowing down feels like a quiet failure. For a long time, I lived in that energy, always feeling as though I had missed an essential memo on how to truly fit in. But the world, in its strange and persistent generosity, kept placing me in cultures that held me differently.

In Costa Rica, my life finally exhaled. The mornings were soft and the days were slow, and people looked you in the eye as if they actually saw the human being standing there. There was no reward for the mask I had learned to wear, and the jungle cared only that I showed up as myself. Botswana wrapped around me like a blessing, teaching me through the rhythm of the land that belonging does not come from trying harder, but from allowing yourself to be held.

Then there was Puglia, which taught me that love can be a home too. Under olive trees older than memory, I promised my life to someone who loves me for who I truly am, not the version I once pretended to be. Being married there stitched one more beautiful thread into the tapestry of where I am local.

Long before the world opened up to me, there was my grandmother’s kitchen. It was the one place where belonging never felt earned or fragile, and where I did not have to achieve anything to be worthy of love. That feeling is what I have found again in the deepest sense with my female friends, especially the ones who have seen every version of me and stayed. There is a soul recognition among women that is ancient and sacred. It is a form of belonging that makes something tight and guarded finally loosen within you.

This is exactly why I do what I do. I create spaces around the world where women can gather, breathe, unravel, and rediscover themselves. I know what it is like to crave belonging and to feel like you are performing your way into acceptance. I know the sheer power of sitting in a circle of women where you can finally, finally put the mask down.

Canada is part of me, but it is not the whole. Costa Rica, Botswana, and Puglia are stitched into my skin, alongside the homes I lived in at sixteen and the kitchen where I first felt safe. I am a mosaic of many cultures and many kinds of love.

Xo

Penny