On the fantasy of belonging, the luggage we bring with us, and the work that has to come first.
Everyone who wants a different life has a village in their head.
A place where everything finally makes sense. Where the loneliness stops. Where everything is beautiful and meaningful. Where the kids run free and the neighbours know your name and you stop feeling like you landed on the wrong planet.
I had mine too.
The fantasy underneath the fantasy
I’ve spoken to enough people walking away from conventional life to know this is almost universal. The fantasy of the village is the fantasy underneath the fantasy. It’s what we’re actually reaching for when we say we want freedom, or nature, or community, or simplicity.
The words are different but the shape of the longing is the same. A place that fits. People who get it. A life that doesn’t require you to constantly explain or justify or shrink yourself to fit into spaces that were never built for you.
That longing is real. It deserves to be taken seriously. But the thing we do with it, which is to locate it somewhere out there, in a place we haven’t found yet, in a community we haven’t joined yet, in a version of life we haven’t built yet, is where it starts to go wrong.
Because the village isn’t waiting for us to find it. It’s waiting for us to be the version of ourselves ready for it. And most of us, honestly, are not.
The luggage we bring
Not because we don’t want it badly enough. But because we haven’t yet unpicked the thing in us that makes belonging feel like a threat.
The part that sees obligation as a trap. That treats people as temporary until proven otherwise. That mistakes solitude for sovereignty. That keeps one foot out of every room as a survival strategy so old it doesn’t feel like a strategy anymore, just a preference.
Those things need inner work to be done before thinking about another way of living. Not as a prerequisite that has to be completed before you’re allowed to try. But because without it, you carry the same patterns into the new life, and they produce the same results in a different setting.
You can move to the most beautiful intentional community on earth and bring all of that luggage with you. It won’t work if you are still in a place of looking outside for magic solutions. The new place becomes the new thing that was supposed to fix it. And when it doesn’t, which it won’t, the disappointment lands harder than it did before because you gave up more to get there.
What the work actually is
The work isn’t finding your people. It’s becoming someone your people can actually choose to live with.
That includes yourself.
Most of us have spent years, sometimes decades, in a complicated relationship with our own company. Running from the quiet. Filling the space. Staying busy enough that the deeper questions don’t get a turn. And then wondering why, in the middle of everything we thought we wanted, the loneliness followed us there too.
The village in your head is not a place. It is a quality of presence, yours and other people’s, that can only happen when people show up as themselves rather than as the managed version they’ve learned to present to the world. That requires something from you before it can require it from anyone else.
It requires you to have done enough of your own work that you can actually be met, not just seen.
What I found instead
I didn’t know I would lose that loneliness, that need to finally belong somewhere, not by finding the right place but by finding something in myself I hadn’t met yet.
That didn’t happen all at once and it isn’t finished. But the quality of it is different now. The village in my head is quieter. Not because I stopped wanting connection, but because the wanting stopped feeling like an emergency.
And that, more than any place I could have moved to, changed what was possible.