Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From. Ask Me Where I’m Local.

“Where are you from?” has always felt like an impossibly small question for the life I have lived.

Not because I don’t know the places I’ve called home, but because none of them, on their own, can contain the truth of who I am.

My upbringing was never singular or straightforward.

By sixteen, I was paying rent, working, going to school, and figuring out the world as I went.

I rented a room in a house full of strangers.

I was independent because I had to be, not because I was ready.

And yet, I wasn’t entirely alone.

My best friend’s parents stepped in with a kind of quiet love that still makes my throat catch.

My father did what he could.

My life became a constellation of homes, a mosaic of people raising me in ways big and small.

I belonged everywhere and nowhere at once.

And maybe that’s why the idea of belonging has always felt tender, complicated, slippery.

North America, especially Canada, only added to that tension.

It’s a culture that hums with urgency.

A place where you are supposed to always be achieving, participating, producing, and proving.

Where it feels like you’re forever one step behind everyone else.

Where rest is suspicious and slowing down feels like failure.

I grew up in that energy, always trying to keep up, always trying to fit in, always feeling like I’d missed some essential memo about how to belong.

But the world, in its strange generosity, kept placing me in cultures that held me differently.

In Costa Rica, life exhaled.

The mornings were soft, the days slower, and people looked you in the eye as if they actually saw you.

There was no pressure to perform, no reward for the mask I had learned to wear.

The jungle didn’t care about my productivity.

It cared only that I showed up as myself, the self I had long forgotten I could be.

Botswana wrapped around me in a way that still feels like a blessing.

There was no urgency there, only the rhythm of the land, slow, ancient, honest.

Community wasn’t a buzzword; it was woven into the fabric of daily life.

There, I learned that belonging doesn’t come from trying harder.

It comes from allowing yourself to be held.

Puglia taught me that love can be a home too.

That belonging can arrive in a moment you never expected, under olive trees older than memory, promising your life to someone who loves you not for who you pretend to be, but for who you truly are.

Being married there felt like stitching one more beautiful thread into the tapestry of where I am local.

And long before any of that, there was my grandmother’s kitchen, warm, safe, smelling of cookies and comfort.

The one place where belonging never felt earned or fragile.

Where I didn’t have to achieve anything to be worthy of love.

But perhaps the deepest, truest sense of home I’ve found has been with my girlfriends, especially my best friend, the one who has seen every version of me and stayed.

The woman I can speak to without filtering, without fear, without the old childhood instinct to prove my place.

There is a kind of soul-recognition among women who genuinely see and love one another.

It is ancient.

It is sacred.

It is a form of belonging that makes something tight and guarded in you finally loosen.

And maybe that’s why I do what I do, why I create spaces around the world where women gather, breathe, unravel, and rediscover themselves.

Because I know what it’s like to crave belonging.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re always performing your way into acceptance.

And I know the power of sitting in a circle of women where you can finally, finally put the mask down.

So when someone asks me where I’m from, I rarely know how to answer.

Canada is part of me, but not the whole.

Costa Rica is part of me.

Botswana is part of me.

Puglia is part of me.

My grandmother’s kitchen is part of me.

The homes I lived in at sixteen.

The families who stepped in.

The women who anchor me.

The circles I’ve created.

The lands that held me.

The parts of myself I discovered in each place.

I am stitched together by many homes.

Many cultures.

Many people.

Many kinds of love.

But I am not fully from any one of them.

If you really want to know me, don’t ask me where I’m from.

Ask me where I’m local.

Ask me where my soul softened.

Where my masks fell away.

Where I learned to breathe.

Where I felt seen.

Where I found love.

Where I became myself.

Those are the places that made me.

Those are the stories that shaped me.

Those are the homes that live in my bones.

And that, far more than geography, is who I am.

Penny