One of the places I’ve felt most at home was a prison in Bolivia.
I’m still trying to understand what that says about me.
I don’t mean that prison felt like somewhere I wanted to remain. I could leave. The people held there couldn’t.
But the feeling was real. And it sits awkwardly beside another feeling I’ve carried for years: I’m often unsure how to explain who I am.
I can tell you what I do. I work with stories, photographs, communities, businesses and systems. I can explain what we’re trying to build through A Curious Tractor. Give me a problem to think about or something practical to work on and I can usually find a way into the conversation.
Ask me where I belong, and I’m less certain.
I’ve travelled through countries where people have welcomed me into their lives and asked me to pay attention. They’ve shared their religion, their culture, their pride in where they come from. I’ve been invited to think about ways of living I hadn’t understood, sometimes hadn’t known existed.
I’ve felt welcome in many of those places. When I arrive with respect and some willingness to listen, people often make room.
What I haven’t found is a clear way to describe my own place in the world. I’ve never quite had the fortitude to lean fully into one identity, culture or philosophy. I’m drawn to different ways of understanding life, but I haven’t settled inside one of them.
Sometimes I wonder whether that openness allows me to connect.
Sometimes I wonder what I’m avoiding.
Work can offer a ready answer to the question of who we are.
There’s a job title. A place to turn up. People who can tell you whether you’re doing well. You learn the expectations, the language, the things that get rewarded. Over time, those arrangements can become so familiar that it’s difficult to see how much they shape you.
Running a business gives you some freedom to arrange things differently. It also gives you more ways to remain occupied. There is always something that needs doing and usually a convincing reason it needs doing now.
I’m trying to understand how much of myself I’ve placed inside that occupation.
When I say I’m committed, what am I committed to? The people involved? The work itself? Keeping the business alive? Being someone who can be counted on?
Those things overlap. They can also pull in different directions.
Then there’s the larger arrangement we work inside. The hierarchy of who owns things, who makes decisions, whose knowledge counts and who has to keep proving their worth.
In Australia, I find it difficult to think about that arrangement without thinking about colonisation. The claim that this land was available to be taken. The institutions built here. The authority carried by property, money and education and how easily advantage can become a story about individual effort.
I don’t have a complete account of how all of that connects. I know I distrust an explanation of success that leaves out what people inherited, who opened the door and who was already excluded.
I’ve often felt outside the rooms where privilege recognises itself. I haven’t worked out how to enter those rooms comfortably, or how much I want to.
Yet I’ve felt welcomed in places where, on paper, I had little reason to belong.
Including that prison.
I keep returning to the word home.
What was I recognising there?
Was it the way I was received? Was there something familiar in the people, or in the way we related? Did I feel useful? Did I feel less occupied with explaining myself?
I don’t want to fill in the memory with an answer that sounds good. I want to understand what actually happened and why the feeling has stayed with me.
It raises a question I care about well beyond that visit: what makes it possible for people to feel at ease with one another?
Culture, religion and shared history can hold people together. I’ve seen how much those connections mean. I’m also interested in the care that can happen between people who arrive without those things in common. The willingness to welcome someone, help them, make room for them, simply because they’re there.
That kind of connection has shaped me.
I’m still working out how to practise it consistently in my own life.
Because feeling welcome is one experience. Becoming someone who helps other people feel welcome asks something more.
This is where the question of showing up becomes difficult.
Who am I showing up for each day? Who gets my attention? Who lives with the consequences when I say yes to another piece of work?
Through ACT, we keep asking who holds the decisions, where the value stays and whether the work can continue without us.
Those questions belong inside my own life too.
I want to do useful work. I want the people we work with to have more freedom and control over what happens. I want a life with room for family, friendship, curiosity and the pleasure of making things.
I’m still learning how to hold those commitments together. I can’t assume that caring deeply about the work means I’m giving the people around me what they need.
And I can’t keep expecting the work to answer every question I have about myself.
So I want to write.
A little each day, while the questions are still unsettled.
I want to notice what I return to, where I contradict myself and what I’m willing to change. I want to get more precise about the things I believe and leave myself enough room to discover I’ve been wrong.
The prison in Bolivia feels like somewhere to begin.
A place where I remember feeling at home, although I still struggle to say why.
Perhaps writing will help me understand that feeling.
It might also help me become clearer about the kind of person I want to be when I walk into the next room.
