I Wanted to Belong. So I Built a Place That I Did.

The Space Between Us.

I didn’t grow up with a clear sense of belonging.

I was queer in a family that didn’t quite have space for it.

Not in a violent or overt way — but in those quieter moments that press just as deep.

Like when my brother said, “You’re not gay, take that diversity flag down!”

Or when my mom told me, “You’re just experimenting — one day you’ll marry a man, buy a house, have kids.”

They said it with love, in the only language they had. But the message underneath was clear:

Be who you are — but only if it makes sense to us.

So I learned to tuck parts of myself away. To keep things soft, agreeable, easy to digest.

To perform a version of myself that would keep the peace.

I knew how to survive a room, but I didn’t know how to belong in one.

Breathing the same air, but never invited to exhale.

Allowed to linger, never to land.

Not quite ghost, not quite guest.

Surviving the space where your spirit keeps shrinking.

The longing never left. That deep, aching hope for a space where I didn’t have to explain myself to be allowed to stay.

That’s what I hoped I could carry into the studio. When I opened The Little, I wasn’t just starting a yoga business — I was making a place I could finally exhale. I was making a place that asked nothing of me but the truth. I was creating a home for the part of me that had been quietly gasping. I was making a space where my spirit could settle.

A place where difference was treasured, not just tolerated.

Where softness wasn’t weakness.

Where everyone, regardless of their shape, history, or heartbreak, could walk in and hear the quiet message:

You belong here. Just as you are.

And the miracle — the true magic — is that it worked. Not perfectly, not always, but again and again people told me:

“The studio was quiet, welcoming, accepting, and stable. I never felt judged, I never felt pressured to perform. I could grow my practice through strength and movement or I could just come into my body on my mat, following my intuition.”

“Your yoga studio has been my one and only since moving to Boulder in 2012. Your warmth, calm, acceptance are unmatched. Anytime I was able to come to a class felt like coming home in a way.”

“I’m so happy I got to be part of the Little. You created a magical space full of love, joy, and acceptance.”

Those words changed me.

Because the studio wasn’t just a space for others to belong —
It became the place I finally did, too.

That’s the space between us:

The invisible thread of recognition.

The gentle nod across the room that says, me too.

The quiet exhale that comes when we realize we’re not alone.

Over time, I came to understand that the studio wasn’t just mine — it was ours.

Built from my longing, yes, but sustained by the presence of everyone who entered it with their own stories, their own hopes, their own hidden aches.

It became a container for collective remembering — of how to be in a body, how to breathe through uncertainty, how to soften into community without needing to earn it.

Not just the teacher, but the whole person behind the cues:

The queer woman who never quite fit the mold.

The sensitive one who felt everything.

The leader who didn’t always have answers, but trusted in holding space.

And people showed up. Not despite those things — but maybe, just maybe, because of them.

The studio was more than a space to teach — it was the first place that ever felt safe enough for me to be fully seen. Within its walls, something softened. I stopped performing and started arriving. And over time, in the steady rhythm of breath and bodies moving together, I found the courage to speak a truth I had carried in silence for so long. It was there — held in that room, by that community — that I finally came out as queer. Not as a declaration, but as a homecoming.

When I first opened the studio, I was married to a man. Young, earnest, devoted — to love, to yoga, to the version of a life I thought I was supposed to build. But the studio, in its quiet and sacred way, invited me into deeper listening. And in that listening, I could no longer ignore what had long lived beneath the surface. Over the years, that space held me through a divorce, a coming out, a second marriage — this time to a woman — and eventually (and sadly), another heartbreaking ending. By the time I locked the studio doors for the last time, I found myself once again in partnership with a man — a white, cisgendered man — and holding a tender, honest hope for family.

It’s not lost on me that this arc confuses some people. That there are those who might see me now and question the legitimacy of my queerness. But queerness is not a performance — it’s not who you’re sleeping with, it’s how you know yourself. It’s the shape your truth takes when you stop contorting it for someone else’s comfort. I’m a cisgendered white woman, yes.

And I’m queer.

I’m fluid.

I’ve loved across gender, I’ve lived outside the binary, and I’ve built a life that refuses to flatten itself into one static label. My queerness isn’t undone by who I love — it’s revealed in how I love.

What does it really mean to be queer? Beyond who we love — what does it say about how we live, how we see, how we belong? Perhaps that’s where I’ll go next.

And, maybe that’s the deeper thread — the one the studio taught me again and again: belonging doesn’t come from being easily understood. It comes from being wholly, unapologetically you, even when the world doesn’t know where to place you. Especially then.

In so many ways, the Little was never about me.

But it also was — because it was the first place where I let myself fully show up.

That’s why I built the studio. Not just to teach yoga, but to create a space where the edges were softer. Where contradiction wasn’t a problem to be solved but a truth to be held. I didn’t always feel like I belonged in the world — not in my queerness, not in my softness, not in the parts of me that refused to stay still. So I made a place where all of that could exist. A room where you could show up messy, uncertain, mid-transformation — and still be met with reverence.

The irony, of course, is that in building a space for others to belong, I ended up belonging to myself. Each season of my life, each shedding and becoming, unfolded inside those walls. The studio didn’t just hold my work — it held me. Through love and loss, through shifting identities and redefined dreams, through the quiet courage it took to let it all be real.

Belonging, I’ve learned, isn’t about arriving at some fixed identity that finally makes sense to everyone else. It’s about creating the conditions — internally and externally — where your truth is safe enough to breathe.

And that’s what the studio was.

Not just a place to practice, but a place to become.

That’s what I keep returning to now.

Although the studio doors have closed, the space between us hasn’t.

That kind of belonging isn’t tied to brick and mortar — it’s relational. It lives in trust. In truth-telling. In showing up anyway.

I’m still figuring out what this next chapter will look like.

But I know it will be shaped by the same intention:

To offer spaces where people feel like they can come home to themselves.

Where they are allowed to be messy, radiant, uncertain, holy.

Where there is room to belong, not because of who they’re trying to become, but because of who they already are.

The place is gone.

The space remains.

And you still belong.

Belonging, I’m realizing, was never about the walls. It was about the people, the presence, the shared breath. It was in the moments between words — a hand on a back, a knowing glance, a deep sigh that says, “You don’t have to do this alone.”

As I move forward — into online classes, into deeper 1:1 mentorships, into writing and teaching with less restraint and more of my full self — that is the thread I will keep holding. That is the thread that holds me.

Because I no longer need to contort to be included.

I no longer believe that I have to earn my place.

And from this place, I can offer what I’ve always longed for:

A space where you, too, can lay something down.

A space where your tenderness is welcome.

A space where you can belong.

The studio is no longer a physical place, but the essence of it — the root system beneath it — still lives and breathes.

And I’ll keep tending it, in all the forms it takes.

This is not an ending. It’s a remembering.

A return to the heart of why I began.

You belong.

We belong.

Still.