How often have you found yourself searching? You may not know exactly what it is that you are searching for, but underneath the life you are living, there is a kind of restlessness that doesn’t seem to leave you.
You may have a perfectly good job, a loving relationship and a community of people who care about you. But no matter how good everything may look on the outside, you still have the feeling that there is something else—something more—waiting for you on the other side.
This has been the story of my life.
I have lived a VERY FULL life. You could say that I am one of those people who seems to have lived multiple lives inside the one life I have been given.
I’ve heard it said to me over and over again: “How could you possibly have done all of those things?” or “Wow, you are so strong. I can’t imagine how you survived.”
I have carried people’s sentiments as both a badge of honour and a heavy burden, trying to find the truth somewhere between the two.
In some ways, I think they are right. My life has been coloured by experiences that many people would have found incredibly difficult to emerge from. And yet, to me, they have always simply been my life.
I am the person who takes the next step, no matter how frightening, enormous or impossible it might seem. I don’t know where I learnt to do this. It has become a kind of blueprint that I follow, much like these words from Nelson Mandela which I heard when I was young. They have stayed with me:
The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
When I was seventeen, I found myself living alone in a bedsit in Exeter. It was while lying in my single bed, pushed up against the window and looking out over a car park, that I realised no one was coming to save me. It was a stark reality that ignited a fire inside me. I was now my own keeper and would have to find my way through.
Yet this was not the beginning of my story—it was only the consequence of the choices I had made up until that point.
My entry into this world was short-lived in the arms of the woman who birthed me. I spent the first ten months of my life in an adoption home before being adopted into a wealthy South African family.
From as early as I can remember, there was movement. Across countries and continents, and then back again. From South Africa to the UK. From the UK back to South Africa. It became a pattern that would repeat itself many times throughout my life.
Each place was called home for a while, yet every departure seemed to leave some part of my story unfinished. Long before I understood what I was searching for, I had become accustomed to looking for it somewhere else.
Perhaps it is not surprising that I grew up without ever feeling that I truly belonged anywhere.
It was because of these multiple beginnings and endings that I began to imagine writing a book. In the past, I thought it would be about the varied and often extraordinary experiences of my life. I thought I might write about growing up in a country moving from apartheid towards becoming the Rainbow Nation, about addiction and recovery, or about motherhood and the remarkable birth and lives of my naturally conceived quadruplets who where born on the leap day in 2012.
These stories are part of the book, but they were never the whole story.
I understood this only after returning to England at the end of 2024, following another attempt to build a life in South Africa. I had gone there with my five children, my husband and his son, believing that we could create a home together in an eco-village in the Western Cape.
This time, I believed, I was returning home.
Yes, at last everything was going to work out for us, and I would finally find the tribe, community and way of living that I had been searching for my whole life.
On paper, it looked perfect. It was everything we had been looking for, and more.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
When that dream came to an end, I returned to England carrying its remains. It felt like another failure, another place left behind. But it was also the experience that finally brought the truth into unmistakable focus.
I began to see the patterns that had repeated themselves over and over again. This time, I was ready not only to see them but to listen and understand what lay at the centre of them all.
Wild Belonging was never only a book about what had happened to me. Beneath all of those experiences was a deeper story: my search for home in relationships, places, work, motherhood, community and spiritual identity.
It was only when I stopped searching that I began to understand what home really was.
For the first time, I was able to look back at my life through different eyes. Not through judgement, shame or the belief that I should have made different choices, but with compassion for the woman I had been.
Writing the book required courage. It meant returning to experiences I had survived but perhaps never fully understood. It meant looking closely at the patterns that had shaped my life and being honest about the choices I had made along the way.
I wrote Wild Belonging because I wanted to tell the truth about that search. I wanted to bring the scattered parts of my life together and understand the deeper story they had been telling all along.
I also wrote it in the hope that, through sharing my experiences, someone else might recognise something of their own story. They might find hope where they had felt defeated, courage where they had felt afraid, or the strength to take the next step when the way forward seemed impossible.
I believe that change is inevitable. Our lives will continue to move, undo and remake us, whether we are ready or not.
I have learnt that true belonging begins when we stop asking another place, person or identity to make us whole. It begins when we become willing to remain with ourselves: to inhabit our bodies, enter into relationship with the living world around us and listen to the life that is already here.
If you would like to learn more about Wild Belonging or join my early-access community as the book moves towards publication, please visit my website.