The Ache to Belong… and the Shadows We Drag With Us

There’s something I’ve been wrestling with.

A trigger I’ve felt rising, pulsing like heat under skin. It’s… the ache of longing, of wanting to belong but not knowing where the hell to stand without overstepping.

I am a Pākehā woman. I am doing the work, of decolonising not just my mind, but the energy I carry when I walk into sacred spaces. Lately I’ve been sitting with a deeper, more uncomfortable truth.

That ache to belong can sometimes become a coloniser of its own.

There’s a hunger I’ve noticed in white bodied spaces… To find something ancient, something rooted and when you haven’t been taught your lineage, or haven’t bothered to search deeper, when your ancestral line feels full of shame, conquest, silence, or blank spaces it’s easier to abandon and hate it than to face it.

Here in Aotearoa, I see people scramble to find “just 1% Māori” in their bloodlines as if that might spiritually cleanse the residue of colonisation.

I see the deep desire to “belong to something sacred” transform into performance, into saviourism, into energetic overstepping a kind of fragile desperation dressed up in reverence. But maybe sometimes, even sacred intentions can be full of ego.

I’ve felt it in me, too. And I’ve caught myself sitting at the edge of the fire, asking: Am I here to serve or to soothe myself?

The work of decolonisation is not just unlearning the wrong history that was fed to

you. It’s watching the energy we bring into spaces that were never ours to lead. It’s realising that just because you love a culture, doesn’t mean you get to take up space in it. Especially when that space still holds the scars of what your lineage may have caused.

There’s this TikToker I follow - a staunch Māori wahine from Taranaki. She speaks with fire and deep ancestral conviction. One day, she said something that triggered the fuck out of me. She spoke about pākeha women having māori babies and how we have no right to teach those children the ways of Te Ao Māori.

It gutted me. I wanted to close the app. Scroll away. Pretend she wasn’t talking to me.

But I didn’t. I stayed. Beneath the sting, something in me knew, this discomfort was the medicine. I kept watching. Kept listening. Kept letting her words rearrange the parts of me that needed unlearning.

I had a baby with a māori boy when I was only 17. My son does whakapapa to the whenua. But that didn’t suddenly make me a groupie or a kaiako or someone who knew what the hell she was doing.

In the years that followed, years of survival, of trying to protect him from his abusive father and to break that cycle I didn’t know how to honour that side of him. I was scared. Alone. Uneducated in the ways I now ache to understand.

Now, as my grown son has walked in his own adulthood. I feel the weight of that sometimes. The things I didn’t know to pass on. The stories I didn’t know to ask about. The language I couldn’t speak into his ears.

But still I carry the hope that, if I am blessed, I may one day stand with the heart of a kuia.

Not by bloodline, but by the way I listen. By the way I love. By the way I honour what is not mine to lead, but mine to protect space for.

A wise elder, to our future mokopuna with deep humility and grace if we are blessed in that way.  As someone who learned how to support without centering herself.

As someone who let discomfort carve her into a vessel for something deeper and as someone who never stopped learning what it means to truly stand beside the sacred.

We don’t have to be the voice to do meaningful work. We don’t have to lead the karakia to be sacred. We can be the support behind the scenes. The open heart holding space. The ally who gives back the mic. And sometimes, that’s the most powerful thing we can do.

My journey to learn Te Reo isn’t to claim my son’s lineage. It’s to honour it. To honour him. To learn to listen better. To show up better.  To be a respectful part of the future he and hopefully his future tamariki  will inherit.

So if you’re pākeha in Aotearoa, and walking this path

Ask yourself Am I entering this space to belong… or to be seen?

Am I trying to fix… or to follow?

Is this truly my role… or is this my ego in a spiritual mask?

The earth doesn’t need more voices demanding to be heard.

She needs those who will sit in the back row supporting, planting seeds quietly, and water the voices rising from the soil of the land herself.