On belonging and what it means to build a space that actually earns it.
- erika
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
I spent a long time waiting to feel like I was in the right room. Eventually I stopped waiting and built one.
I grew up in a small town where nobody quite understood what I was trying to become.
Not because they were unkind. Just because the dream I was carrying didn't have a reference point there. Fashion. Theater. Ships. A life built around making things and going places and understanding the world through its textures and its cultures and the particular way different people put themselves together in the morning. There was no version of that in the town I came from. I always knew I was never meant to stay.
So I left. And I thought belonging would follow.
It did not follow.
Fashion school felt like the right room at first. I was finally doing the thing I knew I was meant to do. Surrounded by people who spoke the same language. Working harder than I had ever worked in my life.
But working hard without reward has a way of making you question whether you are actually in the right place or just in the right place for someone else. The critiques. The cost. The labor with so little return. The slow, grinding feeling that maybe the dream was right but the room was wrong or maybe I was the one who was wrong for it.
I tortured myself with that question for years.
I kept going. Contract after contract. Different ships, different companies, different workrooms. The work was real and I was good at it: genuinely, measurably good. I knew how to do things. I could teach people. I could build a team and make it function and produce work that held up under the particular pressure of performance and travel and the relentless demand of live shows.
But I never felt fully seen in it. I was the girl with lots of stories who could make friends anywhere and get the work done, but couldn't seem to get recognized for either. The skill was there. The recognition wasn't. And after a while the gap between those two things starts to feel like information about your worth instead of information about the room.
"I have spent most of my life being good at things in rooms that didn't fully see me. And for a long time I thought the problem was me."
Here is what I eventually figured out. And it took longer than it should have.
I belong most when I am helping people.
Not being evaluated. Not being assessed or critiqued or measured against a standard set by someone who doesn't know me. Helping. Teaching. Watching someone understand something they didn't understand before. Being the person in the room who knows how to do the thing and wants to share that knowledge instead of protect it.
That is when I feel like myself. Fully, completely, without apology.
And I looked around and realized I had never been in a community that was structurally built around that. Most creative spaces: in fashion, in theater, in the industry broadly; are built around hierarchy. Who knows more. Who has been doing it longer. Who has the credentials and the credits and the right name on their resume. The knowledge flows in one direction and the gatekeeping is the point.
I did not want to build that.
ELE is my answer to every room that made me feel like belonging was conditional.
It is built; deliberately, structurally, from the foundation up, so that the person who has been sewing for thirty years and the person who just picked up a needle for the first time are equally welcome. So that the knowledge moves in every direction. So that showing up curious is enough. So that you do not have to earn your place here by already knowing everything or looking a certain way or coming from the right background.
You just have to come.
The small-town girl with the sketchbook and the dream nobody understood she is welcome here. The graduate who worked twice as hard as everyone around her and still felt invisible : she is welcome here. The person who has been told something is wrong with their face or their work or their vision: especially them. Welcome. Pull up a chair. We are glad you are here.
Belonging is not something I am going to make you earn. It is something I am handing you at the door.
The only thing I ask in return is that you do the same for the next person who walks in.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
— Erika
Founder, ELE · Sewist · Ship person · Finally in the right room
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