There is a half second that most people never experience, and that you have lived through thousands of times.

It is the pause before you say your own name, while you decide which version this particular room has earned: the full one, or the one that has been sanded at both ends so that it passes through an English sentence without catching on anything.

Watch what actually happens inside that half second, because you are not remembering your name. You are calculating an audience. How much explaining will this room tolerate, how much correcting do you have the energy for today, will this person attempt it or arrive within the minute at do you have a nickname?

By the time you speak, an assessment has been run, a verdict returned and the output adjusted accordingly.

And nobody in the room did any of that. You did all of it, in advance, on their behalf.

You already know this reflex

If you have lived across worlds, you will not need this explained, only named.

Think of the message rewritten four times, not for accuracy but for register, or the reference dropped mid-sentence because explaining it would have cost more than the sentence was worth. Think of the joke abandoned because it needed context, of the eight seconds of silence before you speak in a meeting, which reads to everyone else as caution and is in fact rendering time. Think of the phone voice, which almost everyone in the diaspora has, and which almost nobody has been told is a documented sociological phenomenon rather than a private embarrassment.

I call this the Self-Surveillance Reflex: the habit of running yourself through an imagined assessment before anybody has actually assessed you.

It is not vanity, because vanity wants to be admired and this wants only to be unremarkable. It is not anxiety either, although it borrows anxiety’s machinery, because anxiety anticipates a bad outcome whereas this anticipates a reading, and adjusts you in advance so that the reading comes out clean.

It is a rehearsal. And a rehearsal, by definition, is held for an audience.

The mirror that Cooley built

In 1902, Charles Horton Cooley (the American sociologist at the University of Michigan, one of the founders of what became social psychology) published Human Nature and the Social Order and gave us the image the field has been working with ever since. He called it the looking-glass self, and its claim is that we do not know ourselves directly at all; we know ourselves through an imagined reflection in another mind.

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.

Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902)

Three elements, arriving in an order. You picture how you appear. You picture how that appearance is judged. Then a feeling arrives, pride or mortification, and settles into you as though it had come from inside.

Cooley was insistent about the second element, which he thought the comparison to a mirror obscured, because a mirror only reflects and does not judge. What moves us to pride or shame, he argued, is not the reflection but the imputed sentiment, the judgement we imagine the other mind delivering. And the force of that judgement depends entirely on the standing we have granted the mind delivering it. We are ashamed of seeming evasive in front of someone we consider straightforward, and entirely untroubled by the opinion of someone whose authority we never accepted in the first place.

Hold on to that. It is the door out of this essay, and I will come back to it.

Except that the order reverses

In Cooley’s sequence, the feeling arrives third. Something happens, you read the room, and then you feel something about what the room appeared to make of you.

That is not the order I know, and I suspect it is not the order you know either.

The mortification arrives first. Before the room has judged anything, before the sentence has left your mouth, before the message has been sent to someone who has loved you unconditionally for your entire life and has never once commented on your vowels. You are already editing against a verdict that has not been delivered, from a panel that has not convened, in a case that nobody has brought.

Ordinary social awareness responds to feedback. This runs pre-emptively, continuously, and without an off switch, because it is not waiting for a reaction. It has already predicted one.

The mirror is not in the room. The mirror is running whether or not anybody is standing in front of it.

And there is not one mirror. There are two.

Here is where the experience departs from the textbook entirely, because Cooley assumed a single mirror: one audience, one set of standards, one direction in which a person might adjust. Assimilate upward, or outward, or into whichever room you happen to be standing in.

If you have moved between worlds, you have two.

There is the mirror of the country you live in, which reads you for foreignness, and there is the mirror of the place you came from, which reads you for having gone. The second one is the one nobody warns you about.

You go back, and within a day you understand that you are being listened to. Not to what you are saying, but to how you are saying it. Someone repeats a word back to you with a very slight smile. An aunt observes, kindly, that you have started to talk like them. A cousin tells you that you sound successful, and means it as a compliment, and it is not entirely a compliment. Your mother’s neighbour asks whether your children speak it, and the pause before you answer is the whole conversation.

You are being measured for what the crossing did to your speaking.

And because the two mirrors face each other, the judgement runs in both directions at once, which is what makes it impossible to satisfy. Speak the way the host country taught you and you have confirmed a suspicion at home. Speak the way home taught you and you have failed at the very thing you left in order to do. There is no register that clears both panels, and no amount of skill will produce one, because the two standards were never designed to be compatible.

It is not that you are bad at belonging. It is that you are being asked to satisfy two contradictory standards simultaneously, and then quietly blamed for the strain of it.

Which is also why the reflex does not switch off when you land. It simply changes direction.

The standard was built by people with names

There is a detail worth knowing here, because the imagined judge tends to feel eternal, as though the correct way to sound had always existed and you had merely failed to reach it.

It did not always exist. It was assembled, relatively recently, in committee.

In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, founded by John Reith with the stated intention of maintaining a standard of educated Southern English. Its founding members were a poet, a literary scholar, a playwright, two phoneticians and an actor: Robert Bridges in the chair, alongside Logan Pearsall Smith, George Bernard Shaw, Daniel Jones, Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Arthur Lloyd James. The committee met a few times a year to settle general principles of pronunciation for announcers and to issue rulings on doubtful words, and it ran until 1939.

Sit with the ordinariness of that. A handful of men, meeting a few times a year, deciding what the nation would hear as correct, and then broadcasting it into every kitchen in the country until it sounded less like a preference and more like the weather.

The neutral accent is not neutral. It is a local accent that was given a microphone. Every empire has had one, and every empire exported it, which is why the standard you measure yourself against at three in the morning may well have a committee, a date, and a set of minutes.

Your imagined judge is not always a person. Very often it is a policy.

Where, exactly, is your backstage?

Erving Goffman (the Canadian-born sociologist whose work reframed everyday life as theatre) gave us the language of front stage and backstage in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), and his argument was not a cynical one. All social life is performance, he said, and performance is not fraud; it is competence. We manage impressions constantly, and doing it well is a social skill rather than a moral failure.

But his model rests on a quiet assumption that holds the whole structure up, which is that a front stage implies a backstage. Somewhere the costume comes off. Somewhere you stop.

So ask yourself where yours is.

Not the host country, which is a stage, and a demanding one. Not the country of birth either, because being born somewhere is not the same as being claimed by it, and plenty of people spend a lifetime performing in the place their documents call home. And not the country of heritage, if arriving there involves an examination that begins at passport control and continues at your aunt’s table. Not necessarily the diaspora community, which frequently runs the strictest audit of them all, because it knows exactly what you have lost and can price it to the decimal.

And if every room is front stage, the costume never comes off, which costs you far more than tiredness, although it certainly costs you that.

It costs you the joke you did not make. The idea you did not offer because you were still rendering. The version of you that is quick and warm and very funny in a language most of your colleagues have never heard you speak.

The recognition you eventually receive is real, and it is earned. But it is recognition of the edit. Somewhere in a drawer is the unedited file, and increasingly you are the only person who has heard it.

Who is actually on the panel

Now come back to Cooley’s second element, the one he called essential.

A judgement carries only the force of the standing you have granted the mind delivering it. Which means the question is not how do I stop doing this, because willpower does not reach a reflex, and treating it as a personal weakness is a category error in any case. The reflex is not a flaw in you. It is a rational adaptation to rooms that genuinely did assess you, at a time when the assessment genuinely had consequences.

The question is who is on the panel.

Sit with it, because the answers are rarely the ones you expect. A teacher who corrected your pronunciation in front of a class in 1998. A colleague who made you repeat yourself three times in a meeting, and then said it back to the room correctly, as a translation. An interviewer who told you warmly, almost as a compliment, that your accent was quite strong.

Some of these judges are dead. Some never held the authority you granted them. Some were entirely correct about one specific room in one specific year, a room that no longer exists and cannot be re-entered.

You are not rehearsing for the room in front of you.

You are rehearsing for a tribunal you inherited.

And a tribunal, unlike a personality trait, is a piece of architecture. Inherited, load-bearing, assembled by other people for their own reasons, and, unlike most of what shapes us, available for inspection.

Perhaps this is why

Perhaps this is why the question why do I do this has never gone anywhere useful. It assumes the rehearsal is a symptom of something wrong with the performer, when it is a rational response to a room, and the room is not always still there.

You cannot decide to stop the mirror. But you can walk around the room it hangs in and ask, judge by judge, whether this one still holds a seat. Some will. Some rooms are still live and still consequential, and the reflex is doing real protective work in them, which deserves respect rather than shame.

But many will not survive the question. And when a judge is dismissed, something small and specific becomes possible: the message goes out on the first attempt. The name arrives in the room at full length, in the half second that used to be a calculation.

Not perfect. Not neutral. Not universally legible.

Just yours.

Where did you first learn to pre-edit yourself, and whose voice is still on the panel? I would love to read your story in the comments.

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For long stretches that line stays dormant and almost invisible, but in seasons of fear or scarcity or political convenience it is asked to do heavier work, and the stranger who was until then merely unfamiliar becomes something more useful.

The Other becomes the enemy, the unknown becomes the threat, and a society that cannot quite explain its own anxieties goes looking for a face on which to hang them.

Edward Said understood all of this from the inside, not as a theory he arrived at but as a condition he lived, because he spent the better part of his life on the wrong side of that very line.

He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and given, by a mother who admired the Prince of Wales, the conspicuously English name Edward, which sat oddly against his Arabic surname for the rest of his life, a first name and a last name that seemed to belong to two different people, neither of whom felt entirely like home. He grew up moving between Palestine and the British and American schoolrooms of Cairo before building his career, many years and one ocean later, in New York, and when he came to write his memoir he gave the whole condition its truest name by calling the book Out of Place.

Out of place was never a metaphor he reached for so much as the actual texture of his days, the persistent sense of never being wholly inside any of the worlds he passed through, of holding the wrong passport for every room he entered, of being fluent and foreign in the same breath.

He was, as he understood himself, too Western for the East and too Eastern for the West, legible almost everywhere and yet at home nowhere.

And it was from that unhoused vantage point, from the discomfort of belonging nowhere completely, that he came to notice what most people are never forced to see, which is how the Other is made.

In 1978 he gave that machinery both a name and a book. Orientalism, which would change the way a whole generation understood the relationship between knowledge and power, appeared on its surface to be a study of how the West had written about the East, yet underneath that scholarly subject it was concerned with something far more intimate, namely what happens to people whose story walks into the room a moment before they do.

A style of thought

Said’s central claim was deceptively simple, and all the more disquieting for it. The Orient, he argued, was not a place Europe had discovered out beyond its own borders but a place Europe had, over several centuries, effectively produced, assembling out of paintings and novels and travel writing and scholarship and colonial policy an entire East that could then be studied, managed, and ruled.

He defined it this way:

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’”

(Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978)

A style of thought: not quite a lie, and not merely a prejudice that a little more contact might cure, but something far more durable than either, a framework so widely shared and so deeply sedimented that it eventually stopped looking like a framework at all and began, to almost everyone inside it, to look simply like reality.

What made the idea so unsettling was its sheer scale, the way Said could show that poets and administrators, novelists and colonial officers, people who agreed with one another on almost nothing else, had nonetheless inherited the same basic division of the world into an “us” and a “them.” In that division the West appeared rational, modern, and complete, while the East appeared as its convenient opposite, sensuous and backward and perpetually in need of explanation and, as it happened, of governance. The distinction was never neutral; it was a relationship of power wearing the respectable clothes of a relationship of knowledge.

Imaginative geography

The concept I keep returning to is the one Said called imaginative geography, his name for the way we carve the world into the familiar and the foreign, our space and their space, along a line drawn far more by imagination and inherited feeling than by anything solid on the ground.

A society defines itself, in no small part, by what it decides it is not, and the foreigner becomes the surface onto which a culture projects everything it would rather not recognise in itself. Once that projection hardens into common sense, the actual person in front of you becomes almost beside the point, since they are read through the map long before they are ever encountered as themselves.

This is the part that migrants tend to know in their bodies long before they have any language for it, because you arrive somewhere new and discover that a version of you is already there waiting, a portrait assembled in your absence out of headlines and films and vague regional reputations and whatever impression was left behind by the last person who shared your accent, and you can spend years, sometimes decades, correcting a likeness you never sat for.

The question “where are you from?” is rarely cruel, and is often warm and curious and entirely well meant, yet it can also be the moment at which the map is consulted, the moment you feel yourself located inside a story that was written without you and that you are now, somehow, expected to inhabit.

Representation is not description

The deepest lesson of Orientalism is that representation is never quite innocent, that to describe someone is already to exercise a kind of authority over them, because whoever holds the pen gets to decide which details matter and which do not, which traits are charming and which are threatening, and which belong to a single individual and which will be taken as evidence about an entire people.

Said was careful here, and his care is part of what makes the argument so difficult to escape. He did not claim that everything written about the East was false; a great deal of it was accurate, some of it was sympathetic, and much of it was produced by people who loved the places they studied. His point was subtler than accusation: that even accurate description, when it flows in only one direction, becomes a form of control, because the observed so rarely get to observe back, and the described so rarely get to describe.

This is why so much of the migrant experience comes to feel like translation without end, a constant labour of rendering yourself legible to people under no corresponding obligation to render themselves legible to you. You learn their references and their humour, their unspoken rules and their version of history, and the exchange is almost never equal, since belonging here tends to be offered on the unspoken condition that you keep translating in one direction and never ask the room to translate itself back.

Perhaps this is why certain encounters leave behind a residue that is so difficult to name afterwards, because what they involve is not always exclusion in any obvious sense but something quieter and more disorienting, the experience of being included, warmly even, as a character in someone else’s story rather than being recognised as the author of your own.

The gaze that moves inward

Said showed, with great patience, how the Other is built from the outside, but it took another writer to describe what happens on the day that construction is finally swallowed whole.

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist whose Black Skin, White Masks appeared in 1952, spent his working life inside the minds of colonised people, and what he found waiting there was a particular and intimate kind of injury, not simply that the colonised were described from without, but that they gradually came to see themselves through the describer’s own eyes. The outside gaze, in other words, migrated inward and took up residence, until it became the very lens through which a person looked at their own face in the mirror.

Fanon called the result alienation, though he meant something far more exact than loneliness by the word; he meant an estrangement from oneself, a self split in two between the person underneath and the mask that person learns to wear in order to be acceptable, black skin beneath a white mask. Over enough time the mask stops feeling like a costume at all, you forget that you are performing anything, and you begin, most painfully of all, to distrust whatever remains in you that refuses to resemble the standard you were taught to admire.

This is the wound that sits underneath assimilation, and it is why the word “integration” can cost so much more than it appears to, because you can master the language and the manners and the references and still discover that such mastery carries a hidden price written into its very terms. To take on the coloniser’s tongue, Fanon observed, is also to take on the coloniser’s world and its measure of what counts as intelligent, cultured, and real, so that fluency itself can become a kind of unspoken consent to the very hierarchy that ranked you below to begin with.

Migrants tend to know this internal weather intimately, even the many who never find a name for it, whether it takes the form of the instinct to soften an accent in front of a certain kind of listener, or the reflex to pre-empt the judgement of a room by judging yourself first and more harshly than anyone else would dare, or the low and tiring vigilance of endlessly watching yourself being watched. It is the mind policing itself on behalf of an authority that no longer even needs to be in the room, because it has long since been installed within.

Fanon’s diagnosis is undeniably bleak, yet it clarifies something Said tends to leave implied, which is that the story entering the room ahead of us does its deepest and most lasting damage not in the moment when others tell it, but on the day we begin to tell it about ourselves.

The one who sees the frame

And yet Said’s own life suggests that this condition holds within it something other than injury, something that can even, in time, be turned to use.

He had, after all, described himself in the title of his memoir as out of place, a man born in Jerusalem, schooled in Cairo, and exiled into America, never fully at home in any single language or nation, and out of that biography he came to understand exile not merely as the loss of a territory but as a permanent and oddly productive doubling of vision.

The person condemned to live between worlds is also, by the same stroke, forced to see each of those worlds from the outside, and therefore to notice what its more settled inhabitants never can.

To describe this doubled way of perceiving he borrowed a word from music, contrapuntal, drawn from the art of counterpoint in which several independent melodies are sounded at once, each remaining distinct and yet together producing something richer than any single line could manage alone. Said believed that those who had lived across cultures could learn to hear existence in just this contrapuntal way, holding more than one story in the mind at once without feeling compelled to collapse them into a tidy single one.

This, I have come to think, is the hidden inheritance of fractured belonging, because once you have watched more than one society describe itself as natural and inevitable and complete, you slowly lose the ability to believe any of them entirely, and you begin instead to notice the frame around the picture. You come to see that national stories are assembled rather than given, that hierarchies are built and then carefully maintained, and that the categories so many people mistake for reality were manufactured, often quite recently, and often by someone who stood to benefit from their being believed.

None of this is only about the East and the West. The machinery Said described did not politely disappear when the empires formally ended; it survived, and survives still, inside the everyday assumptions we go on carrying about which countries are to be taken seriously, which accents sound intelligent, and which lives are permitted to count as modern. The map was first drawn across the long centuries of colonial rule, and we are, most of us, still living inside its borders, still inheriting its hierarchies as though they were facts of nature rather than decisions once made by particular people for particular reasons.

Which stories we are willing to keep

To read Said as a migrant is to receive a rather uncomfortable gift, because he takes the disorientation you have been carrying for years and shows you that it was never confusion at all but perception, and that the persistent sense of not quite fitting the story on offer was entirely accurate. You did not fit it for the simplest of reasons, which is that it was never built to hold you in the first place.

That recognition does not erase the difficulty; being described before you are ever met remains exhausting, and translating endlessly in one direction remains its own form of quiet, unpaid labour. But something shifts the moment you can see the frame for what it is, because you stop mistaking an inherited story for the plain truth about yourself, and you begin to understand that the real work of a life is not to discover which single story you were always meant to belong to, but to decide, slowly and deliberately, which of the many stories you have been handed you are willing to keep, which you are willing to revise, and which you are finally willing to set down for good.

The story still enters the room before we do, and Said never pretended otherwise, for it would be a kind of lie to end by suggesting the thing can simply be banished. What he offered instead was something slower and far more durable than escape, which was authorship, the patient and deliberate reclaiming of the pen.

Not because the story that arrived first was never powerful.

But because it was never the only one that could be told, and it was never truly ours to begin with.

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In this first episode of The Modern Migrant, I explore the concept of fragmented identity, the often invisible experience of becoming different versions of yourself across cultures, contexts, and expectations.

From code-switching and adaptation to the quiet feeling of not fully belonging anywhere, this episode gives language to something many people live but rarely name.

Through reflection, cultural references, and contemporary art, we explore:

• Why identity begins to feel divided when you live across worlds

• How adaptation shapes who you become

• Why fragmentation is not failure but evidence of a life lived across multiple realities

Featuring insights from artists and film that capture the emotional and structural reality of living “in-between.”

This episode isn’t about fixing identity. It’s about seeing it more clearly.

Because sometimes the shift is simple: realising it was never just you.

Artists:

• Aziza Kadyri — Play Nice (Somerset House Studios)

• Madeleina Kay — visual art & political identity work

Films:

• Atlantics — directed by Mati Diop

• Minari — directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Conceptual Framework:

• Homi K. Bhabha — The Location of Culture (Third Space / “in-betweenness”)

Subscribe to the Modern Migrant on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack ⁠⁠for essays, reflections and conversations that continue beyond the podcast.

Visit ⁠⁠themodernmigrant.com⁠⁠ to explore The Identity Gap™, a framework for understanding the space between lived experience and social recognition.

It was submitted to Simon Fraser University in 2021 by Ljudmila Petrović (Serbian-born researcher in counselling psychology, raised in Vancouver), and it concerns women of what researchers call the 1.5 generation: born in the former Yugoslavia and raised somewhere else entirely, old enough to have been carried out of a war and young enough not to remember it properly. They are the children of the people the world wrote about at length in the 1990s, and almost nobody has written about them.

Petrović gives their condition a name, which is the first thing she does and possibly the most important. She calls it the balkanization of identity.

The word was originally geopolitical, describing the fracture of a state into smaller and mutually hostile pieces. What she does is turn it inward, using it to describe what happens inside a person when identity splits along the same lines the country did, through transgenerational trauma, through patriarchal violence, and through migration. The fracture that occurred at the level of the map is repeated, decades later and thousands of miles away, at the level of a single woman trying to explain where she is from.

This is a specific history and it is not mine, and I want to be careful about that. But the mechanism she describes is not confined to one region, and it is the precision of the mechanism that I have not been able to put down.

The silence had a shape

The finding that stopped me was about the things that were never said.

Research on intergenerational trauma has established that what passes from one generation to the next is not only what parents tell you, but also what they cannot bring themselves to tell you, and the gaps they leave behind do not stay empty for long. The child fills them, because a child will always fill them with something.

Marianne Hirsch (American literary scholar of memory) calls what the following generation carries postmemory, meaning a connection to events you did not live through that has been transmitted with such force that it can crowd out the memories you actually made yourself. Your own life, in other words, displaced by your parents’. Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török (Hungarian-French psychoanalysts) reached for something starker and called it the phantom: an unnamed and unseen presence that occupies a family, sitting in every room and never once described aloud.

You do not inherit a story so much as you inherit its outline, and then spend a good part of your life trying to work out what was supposed to go inside it.

There is a further detail in this literature that I keep returning to, which is that the silence is gendered. In research with Bosnian families, fathers tended to occupy the position of what one researcher calls the horror keeper, holding what they had seen on the understanding that it was not to be passed on, so that it surfaced sideways instead: in the body, in what the body could no longer do, in the particular register of war jokes that allows a man to gesture at an experience without ever entering it. Mothers, by contrast, were more likely to give their children something closer to an actual account.

The children of those households therefore received two transmissions of entirely different kinds, and one of them was mostly atmosphere.

Which griefs get written down

This is the point at which the thesis stops being psychological and becomes structural, because the silence was never simply the private failure of one father who could not find the words.

It had an architecture, and the architecture is very old.

When Vuk Karadžić (nineteenth-century Serbian linguist and folklorist) began setting Serbian oral tradition down in writing, he catalogued it by gender: epic poetry was heroic and belonged to men, while ballads, love songs and ritual poetry were classed as women’s. What became a book, therefore, was the men’s, and what stayed in the mouth and was very largely lost was the women’s. Men’s losses in war entered the historical record as heroism, while women’s entered it as sacrifice, told from grandmother to granddaughter and written down almost nowhere at all.

There is even a formal role attached to this. The narikače are women who perform the ritual lamentation for the dead, telling the story of the deceased in verse, which means that the culture formally appoints women as its carriers of grief and then declines to write down what they are carrying.

Perhaps this is why the silence in these families lands with the weight that it does. It was never one man’s inability to speak; it was the domestic expression of a much older system that had already decided, centuries before any of these women were born, which griefs enter the archive and which are only ever felt.

The women in Petrović’s study were not failing to inherit a story. They were inheriting precisely what the system had been designed to hand them.

Homesick for a tense

There is also the question of what these children are supposed to be longing for, which turns out to be considerably stranger than it first appears.

Yugonostalgia is the name given to the longing, in Yugoslavia’s successor states, for the country and the way of life that preceded the wars, and Mitja Velikonja (Slovenian cultural theorist) describes those narratives as being not only about how a people once were but about how they never were.

The object of the nostalgia is at least partly a construction, assembled after the fact out of what people wished had been true.

Now place a child inside that arrangement. She is asked to feel loss for a country that no longer exists, in a version of it that never quite did, often in a language she cannot read fluently, and every summer visit confirms the same quiet thing: she is a guest in the place she is supposed to be from.

She is not homesick for a place. She is homesick for a tense.

Petrović writes that these children come to feel they belong to somewhere they have never known and will never truly know, which leaves them physically distant from a homeland and temporally distant from it as well. There is no flight that closes the second gap.

The border is not always at the border

Identity in this research refuses to stay abstract, descending instead into the body and into gestures so small that you would never think to defend them.

Researchers working in postwar Sarajevo found participants describing a belief that people count kisses, because Serbians greet with three kisses on the cheek while other groups greet with two. So you learn to manage your own greeting, performing ambiguity in a movement you have made since childhood, in the half-second before you touch someone’s face.

The border, it turns out, is not always at the border. Sometimes it is in how many times you kiss someone hello, and in the fact that you have learned to count.

What survives migration in this literature is rarely the nation, because what survives is far more local than that. Researchers use the term trans-localism for it: a belonging that attaches itself to a dialect, a village, a region or a particular street rather than to anything as large as a flag. Petrović notices it in her own family and records it in a footnote, where lavender returns her father to his childhood on the island of Hvar and linden trees return her mother to the street she grew up on in Belgrade. Not a country, then, but a smell that puts a specific person back in a specific place at a specific time.

The children raised in diaspora frequently do not have that. What they have are the stories about it, which is a different substance entirely.

The method was the argument

I want to say something about how the thesis was built, because the method is doing as much work as anything it found.

Petrović did not survey these women; she sat with four of them, asked them to tell their own stories, and treated the telling itself as the repair. She used narrative inquiry, drawing on the tradition of narrative therapy, in which a person’s account of themselves becomes the site of the work rather than the raw material for somebody else’s analysis. She also placed her own narrative in the introduction, including the surname a great-grandfather chose as a business decision, the grandfather killed in the 1999 bombings, and the queerness that remains hidden from her extended family, all of which amounts to a refusal of the position of neutral observer.

She has good reason for that refusal. Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatian-Dutch novelist and essayist) had already described the foreign chroniclers who arrived to narrate that collapse as connoisseurs of other people’s misfortune, and the question of who holds the pen has never been separable from the question of what ends up recorded.

Which brings me to the part I believe is transferable.

You do not repair a fragmented identity by locating the missing pieces, because most of them are not recoverable: the people who held them are dead, or will not speak, or spoke in a language you half lost somewhere along the way. What changes is authorship. You stop being the place where an unexplained history is stored and become the person giving an account of it, and although the fragments themselves do not resolve, they are now being narrated by someone who was previously only carrying them.

The line I cannot stop thinking about

The thesis is dedicated to the forgotten generation that has never seen themselves represented, which is the entire condition compressed into a single line.

Not that the experience was absent, but that it had nowhere to be recognised, no vocabulary attached to it, and no category in which it counted as a real thing that had happened to someone.

The experience was real. The language was missing.

And then somebody gave it a name, and four women sat down and told it, and it became something a person could actually hold.

There is a question that stalls me every time it is asked, and it is one of the smallest questions in the language: where is home?

Watch what happens when it is asked. Some people answer immediately. I begin negotiating. Home is where I live now, sort of. Home is where I grew up, partly. Home is a kitchen in one country, a language in another, a version of my mother in a third. The honest answer, the one that sounds evasive but is actually precise, is everywhere and nowhere.

For a long time, I thought this hesitation belonged only to migration, one of the quiet costs of living between countries. I no longer think that. Migration is one way of exposing something much larger: that identity is rarely singular. It is layered, adaptive and continuously negotiated, and some lives are simply required to notice this earlier than others.

This essay is about what happens when a life outgrows the stories available to explain it. And what becomes possible once you stop mistaking that complexity for a flaw.

Becoming many selves

If you have lived across worlds, you know the inventory without being told.

There is the you of your first language, who is funnier, quicker, somehow younger. Or, for some of us, the opposite: the you of the birth language is the halting one, reaching for words that never fully arrived, a stranger in the tongue that was supposed to be home. The you of your second language, more careful, more deliberate, built for accuracy rather than warmth. The workplace you, calibrated to the room’s idea of professionalism. The family you, fluent in an older set of expectations. And the you that returns the moment your mother calls, a self you thought you had outgrown, fitting instantly.

Code-switching is the technical name, but the term undersells the experience. This is not switching between codes. It is maintaining an entire repertoire of selves, each rehearsed, each context-specific, each genuinely yours, each answering to a different world.

Which leads, sooner or later, to the question underneath: if all of these versions are real, which one is actually me?

For a long time, the available answers all treated the multiplicity as the problem. Fragmentation was read as confusion. Hybridity as incompleteness. Living between cultures became an identity crisis, with the emphasis on crisis, something to be resolved by finally choosing: integrate or return, assimilate or preserve, pick a self and commit.

The multiplicity itself became the diagnosis.

What Pirandello understood

More than a century ago, the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello built an entire novel on this vertigo. In One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, his protagonist slowly discovers that he exists differently in every mind that encounters him. His wife knows one version of him, his creditors another, strangers a hundred more, and there is no single, stable self waiting underneath to arbitrate. He is one to himself, a hundred thousand to the world, and therefore, in any final sense, no one.

Pirandello staged this as an existential catastrophe, and his character never recovers from it.

For millions of people living across cultures, it is simply everyday life. What the novel treats as a crisis of philosophy, we experience as a Tuesday. The difference is that Pirandello’s man had no framework to catch him. He concluded that the multiplicity was the end of the self.

We get to conclude something else, because in the decades since, thinkers have built the frameworks he lacked.

Then Bhabha changed the question

Homi K. Bhabha (the Mumbai-born literary theorist, long at Harvard, one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies) published The Location of Culture in 1994, and its central move was to take everything the fragmented person experiences as failure and rename it as a site.

The mistake, Bhabha argued, is imagining cultures as sealed containers between which people travel, pure traditions that migrants shuttle across or awkwardly combine. Cultures are always meeting. And where they meet, something happens that is neither mixture nor compromise. He called the location of that happening the Third Space: the in-between territory where a person is no longer only what they came from and never simply what they arrived into, and where, crucially, something new gets made.

Hybridity, in his account, is not half this and half that, forever incomplete on both counts. It is a third thing, generated in the overlap, that neither origin could have produced alone. The in-between is not the absence of a position. It is a position, and Bhabha insisted it is the productive one: the vantage from which the rules of both sides become visible, precisely because you are standing where they fail to cover.

Read that against the inventory of selves above and the reframe lands. The many selves are no longer evidence of failure.

They are evidence of creation.

Kristeva goes one step deeper

If Bhabha explains where new identities are formed, Julia Kristeva explains why the formation feels so unsettling, and why it concerns everyone, not only those who moved.

Kristeva (the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and philosopher, herself an emigrant who left Bulgaria for Paris in her twenties) published Strangers to Ourselves in 1988, and its argument begins where most writing about foreigners stops. The foreigner, she proposes, is never only the person outside us, the one at the border or the new desk or the end of the street. Foreignness also lives inside us:

“The foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.” Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1988)

Every psyche, in her account, contains its own stranger: the unfamiliar impulses, the unassimilated histories, the parts of ourselves we do not recognise and prefer to project outward onto people we can call foreign. Migration does not create this condition. It reveals it. The migrant simply discovers first, and more visibly, what is true of everyone: that identity was never as singular or stable as the settled are permitted to believe, that we are all composed of multiple histories, languages, memories and inheritances that never fully agree.

Some lives simply expose the complexity earlier than others. Which means the fragmented identity is not a deviation from the human condition.

It is the human condition, with the lights on.

The stories that failed us

So if the multiplicity is creative by Bhabha’s account and universal by Kristeva’s, why has it so often felt like damage?

Not because anything was broken. Because the stories we inherited only recognise two possibilities. Either you remain rooted, one self in one place, or you become lost. There is almost no language for the people who become something else entirely, the third thing, made in the overlap.

And when language is missing, experience becomes difficult to recognise, including to yourself. What should be understood as adaptation gets mistaken for confusion. What should be read as range gets labelled inconsistency. The exhaustion of maintaining many selves gets filed under anxiety, as if it were produced by your psyche rather than by the work.

The problem was never our identities. It was the poverty of the stories available to explain them.

Stories are not decoration. They are infrastructure. They decide which experiences are legible, which lives count as coherent, which kinds of person are recognised as whole. And when the infrastructure has no room for your experience, the experience does not stop being real. It goes unnamed, and unnamed experiences are almost always misdiagnosed as personal failings.

This is the space I write from: not the gap in you, but the gap between what you live and the language you were given to live it in.

Home everywhere and nowhere

Perhaps this is why “where is home?” has always been the question that stalls me. It assumes home is a point on a map, and we stopped being map-shaped some time ago.

Home, for the person of many selves, is not a location. It is something carried: between languages, between relationships, between memories and ways of seeing. Everywhere and nowhere was never the confession of homelessness it sounds like. Everywhere, because every place left something behind in you. Nowhere, because no single place can hold the whole archive.

The fragmented identity is not suspended between homes.

It is built from them.

The real question

So the question was never which of these selves is the real one.

Not because they are masks. And not because one of them will eventually win. But because identity was never the search for a single authentic self hiding beneath the versions. It has always been the practice of becoming, and the versions of you are not fragments of a broken original. They are the archive of every world you have learned to inhabit.

Pirandello’s man was undone because he thought discovering the hundred thousand meant losing the one. He had no Third Space, no stranger within, no story large enough to hold him.

You do. And so perhaps home was never going to be the place where all your selves finally become one.

Perhaps home is the place where they no longer have to.

The loudspeakers played an old song, “Mirišu Ljiljani”, and tens of thousands of people stood up and sang it together, word for word, many of them in tears. To anyone outside the blue sections it was a pleasant folk tune. To anyone inside them it was almost unbearable.

Because nothing in that moment was only what it appeared to be. The song is by Halid Bešlić, one of the most beloved voices the Balkans ever produced, and he did not live to see a stadium in America sing it back. It dates from 1991, the edge of the war, and the lilies it mourns are not flowers. The golden lily was the symbol of wartime Bosnia, stitched onto the flag under which the country bled through siege and genocide, more than one hundred thousand dead, a nation scattered until one in three Bosnians now lives somewhere else. Even the team carries the flower: their nickname is Zlatni Ljiljani, the Golden Lilies.

So when that crowd sang about lilies, they were singing the war, the dead, the singer, the flag, the leaving, and the impossibility of return, folded into one melody, in a city eight thousand kilometres from Sarajevo.

I have never been to Bosnia. But I knew that sound instantly, because I grew up inside a version of it.

Homesick for a home I never had

I was born in Bulgaria and never lived there. My life happened elsewhere, but every summer we went back, and each return was an immersion so total it felt like changing bodies. The emotional register shifted the moment we arrived. People felt things at full volume. Grief was allowed to be grief. Joy was allowed to be loud.

There was the horo, the circle dance, hands linked with strangers who were somehow not strangers, the line curling around courtyards and wedding halls as if the dance itself were drawing the shape of belonging: a circle, closed, with you inside it. There was the old music, always the old music, songs everyone’s parents had loved, sung with an ache that seemed to predate the people singing them.

And I would feel it: a longing so specific it had texture. Except the thing I longed for had never been mine. I was nostalgic for a Bulgaria I had never lived in, for a time before my time, for a country that existed mostly in summers and songs. For years I thought this made my nostalgia fraudulent.

Then I learned that this is what nostalgia actually is.

The disease of the displaced

Nostalgia began its life not as a feeling but as a diagnosis.

The word was invented in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, who welded it together from Greek: nostos, the return home, and algos, pain. He coined it to describe a condition doctors were seeing in Swiss soldiers serving far from their mountains: a wasting sickness of longing, with physical symptoms, considered at the time potentially fatal. The prescription reveals the entire worldview: send the soldier home. Nostalgia was understood as a disease of geography, and geography could cure it.

The Balkans quietly knew better, and had encoded the knowledge in music. Bosnia’s great song tradition is the sevdalinka, the slow art-song of longing, and the word itself is a small history lesson: sevdah came through Turkish from the Arabic sawda, meaning black bile, the melancholic humour of old medicine. The region had folded the medical theory of sorrow directly into the name of its music. Longing, the songs understood, was not a malfunction to be cured. It was a register of the soul, something to be practised, sung, and even savoured, ideally at length, ideally after midnight.

Three centuries after Hofer, a scholar finally explained why his cure could never have worked. Svetlana Boym (the Russian-American scholar of comparative literature at Harvard, herself an emigrant from Leningrad) spent her career on the subject and produced the definition that everything since has orbited. Nostalgia, she wrote, is

“a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001)

Read it twice, because each half of that sentence holds a different people.

A home that no longer exists: that is the Bosnians in Los Angeles. Their displacement was not a career move. It came out of siege and slaughter, out of the worst atrocity Europe had seen since 1945, and the home they left did not stay behind to be visited. The prewar Bosnia of mixed neighbourhoods and unlocked doors was not merely changed by the war; for many, it was murdered by it. You can fly to Sarajevo tomorrow. You cannot fly to 1990. Their longing has no address a plane can reach, which is why it needed a song instead.

A home that has never existed: that is me at the edge of the horo, aching for a Bulgaria assembled from summers, other people’s memories, and music older than my mother. Svetlana Boym’s insight is that these two longings are the same emotion. Nostalgia was never really about a place. It is about a time, wearing a place’s clothes. And since time cannot be returned to, all nostalgia is, in the end, longing for something partly imagined, which does not make it false. It makes it human.

What the longing is for

Modern psychology has spent two decades rehabilitating what Hofer pathologised, and the findings would not surprise anyone raised on sevdah.

Researchers at the University of Southampton, led by Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, have shown across hundreds of studies that nostalgia mostly functions as a resource rather than a wound. Triggered by music more reliably than by almost anything else, it counteracts loneliness, strengthens the sense that life has meaning, and knits the self together across time, reminding a person that the one who left and the one who stayed and the one standing in a foreign stadium are the same continuous someone. Nostalgia, in this research, is not the opposite of coping. It is one of the ways coping is done.

Which reframes the Balkan relationship with longing entirely. A region repeatedly broken by empire, war, and exodus did not develop its vast repertoire of aching music because it was trapped in the past. It developed that repertoire as technology: a way of carrying the past that would otherwise be uncarryable. The sad songs are not the symptom. They are the treatment.

But the treatment has one requirement. It works best when it is not taken alone.

Why it had to be sung together

Here is what was happening, physiologically, in that Los Angeles stadium.

When people sing together, their bodies begin to cooperate beneath their awareness. Breathing aligns, because a song makes every chest obey the same phrasing. Researchers in Sweden monitoring choirs have watched singers’ heart rates fall into step with one another as they sing. Work by Robin Dunbar’s group at Oxford has found that group singing releases endorphins and bonds strangers faster than almost any other shared activity; they call it the ice-breaker effect. A crowd that sings together is, for the length of the song, one synchronised organism.

Sociology named the feeling a century before the labs measured it. Émile Durkheim called it collective effervescence: the electric sensation of a gathered group moving as one, which he considered the raw material of everything sacred. People experience it and reach for words like holy, he argued, because in that moment they are feeling something real: the force of the group itself, running through each body at once.

Now put the pieces together. Take a scattered people whose home no longer exists in the form they lost it. Take an emotion, nostalgia, that psychologists find is most powerfully triggered by music and most healing when shared. Take the one activity, collective song, that measurably merges separate bodies into one. And take a stadium, the last public architecture where thirty thousand people are permitted, even expected, to feel everything at maximum volume.

What happened before the Switzerland match was not a crowd warming up for football. It was a dispersed nation running its oldest repair ritual at industrial scale. For four minutes, the diaspora was not a statistic of departure. It was a single body, breathing in Bosnian.

The circle, closed

Bosnia’s World Cup ended the way underdog stories usually do, beaten in the knockout round, and it does not matter at all. Runs end. What the tournament actually delivered was that song, in that city, sung by the children of the displaced to a singer who did not live to hear it, about lilies that were never only flowers.

I think now of the horo of my childhood summers, the circle of hands that pulled me in before I could ask whether I had the right to join. I used to believe my longing was counterfeit because the home it pointed to was partly imagined. I had it exactly backwards. The circle was never asking where you had lived. It was asking whether you carried the ache, and the ache was the membership.

Nostalgia is not the failure to arrive in the present.

It is the evidence of how much we were built by somewhere else, and singing it together may be the closest a scattered people ever comes to going home.

Not because the song brings the country back. But because, for the length of it, the country is wherever they are standing.

Here is the link to the video of the stadium, for anyone who wants to hear what tens of thousands of people longing in unison sounds like.

You can assemble it, chapter by chapter, from history, and the journalist gathers much of it in How to Kill a Language, her account of why languages disappear. Her central correction is the one that matters most: languages do not die. Dying is what organisms do, quietly, from the inside. Languages are killed. From the outside. By decisions.

I keep returning to that distinction because “language death” makes extinction sound like weather: regrettable, natural, nobody’s fault. But stand behind any “dying” language for long enough and you will find a policy, a school, a border, a pay gap, a raised eyebrow in a meeting.

A language does not die when its last speaker dies. It dies earlier than that, and more quietly: it dies when the second-to-last speaker decides there is no one left worth speaking it to.

The first method: force

The oldest chapter is the bluntest one. Colonial administrations understood, with remarkable clarity, that you hold territory with soldiers but you keep it with schools.

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who died last year, still writing, still refusing, described his own childhood in exactly these terms. At home there was Gikuyu, the language of stories told around the fire, of riddles and proverbs, of his mother.

At school there was English: enforced, ranked, rewarded.

Children caught speaking Gikuyu on school grounds were punished, sometimes made to wear a sign around the neck declaring their own stupidity, and the lesson being taught was never really linguistic. The lesson was hierarchical: what you came from is beneath what you are being offered.

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ names the mechanism with a precision no one has improved on since: the bullet subjugates the body, but language subjugates the spirit. Conquest handles the territory. The classroom handles the imagination.

Which is why he insists, across the whole book, that a language is never just a tool for getting things said. It is a carrier of memory, of values, of a people’s accumulated way of seeing:

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)

Kill the language and you have not deleted words. You have wiped the memory bank, and left a people fluent only in someone else’s archive of themselves.

The second method: the flag

Empires are not the only killers. Nations do it too, and often to their own.

Nation-building has always had a sound: one flag, one people, one tongue. France pursuing Breton and Occitan out of its classrooms. Franco driving Catalan and Basque from public life. Turkey and Kurdish. The logic is presented as unity, and unity somehow always turns out to mean sameness, with the regional language recast as a threat to the modern state, or worse, an embarrassment to it.

Notice that the method softened over time but never actually changed. Force gave way to administration. You no longer punish the language; you simply decline to conduct life in it. No forms in it, no courts in it, no news in it, no jobs in it. The language is not banned.

It is merely made useless. Which is slower, and quieter, and works far better.

The third method: love

Then there is the chapter that is hardest to read, because no villain appears anywhere in it.

Migration kills languages through the people who love them most. A family arrives somewhere new. The parents run the calculation, and this is the terrible part, they run it correctly: their child’s future will be priced in the local language. So they speak it at home, even brokenly, even at the cost of their own eloquence, trading the language in which they are funny and precise and fully themselves for one in which they will be forever slightly reduced. And they make the trade for the child.

The child grows up able to understand the grandmother but not answer her. Able to receive the inheritance but not sign for it.

No decree did this. No soldier, no schoolmaster with a sign around a child’s neck. Just a series of reasonable decisions, each one made out of love, each one defensible on its own, adding up to a silence.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is what the statistics on “language shift” can never show you: that a language most often dies at a kitchen table, in the second a parent answers their child in the new language because it is easier, because it is safer, because it is better for them. And both things are true at once, the love and the loss, in the same sentence.

The fourth method: shame

But why does the calculation keep coming out that way? Why does the mother tongue lose the cost-benefit analysis every single time?

Because languages carry price tags, and the prices are rigged.

Bourdieu called it the linguistic market: every accent, every language, every register carries a value set not by clarity or beauty but by its distance from power. Some ways of speaking are heard as intelligence.

Others are heard as backwardness, and heard that way before a single idea has been expressed. The listener believes they are evaluating the speaker, when what they are actually doing is reading a price tag that history wrote.

This is where the killing becomes self-service. Once a language is associated with poverty, with the village, with the past, no state needs to suppress it any longer, because its own speakers will do the work: softening the accent, correcting the children, saving the mother tongue for jokes and scolding until it becomes a language in which nothing serious can be said, since nothing serious is ever said in it.

Perhaps this is why so many of us police our own mouths without ever having been told to. You hear yourself through the room’s ears before the room has heard you at all: flattening the vowel, swallowing the word your grandmother used, translating yourself in real time. And you call it professionalism, or fitting in, when it is the fourth method running quietly inside you, on your own electricity.

Ngũgĩ saw the end state of this coming. Domination triumphs finally, he wrote, when the dominated start singing its virtues. Applied to language, the triumph is complete on the day you stop mourning the tongue you lost, the day you agree it was a fair trade.

The fifth method is still being written

Smith Galer ends where we now live, with the question of whether technology becomes the killer’s final chapter or its first real obstacle.

The pessimistic reading writes itself. The internet speaks a handful of languages, and AI is trained overwhelmingly on them; a model that has read half the English ever digitised and almost no Wolof (a widely spoken West African language) does not treat the two neutrally, it industrialises the prestige gap. The linguistic market goes global, algorithmic, open twenty-four hours a day. Every autocorrect that “fixes” a name, every voice assistant that cannot hear an accent, is a small vote for the old hierarchy, cast millions of times a day by machines that have no idea they are voting.

But the optimistic reading is real too. The same machinery that concentrates language can archive it, teach it, keep it moving. A grandmother’s voice can now be recorded, transcribed, turned into lessons for a grandchild on another continent. Communities are building keyboards, digital archives and translation tools for languages that publishing houses never bothered with, which means that for the first time the means of linguistic production are not entirely in the hands of states and markets.

The technology has no opinion. It will amplify whichever force feeds it, which returns the question, as it always does, to us.

What survives

Ngũgĩ’s answer to all five methods was a single act: he stopped. In 1977 he was imprisoned without trial for a play performed in Gikuyu; notice that the offence was not the content but the language. In his cell he wrote his next novel on prison toilet paper, in Gikuyu, then announced he was done writing fiction in English. Critics told him he was shrinking his audience. He replied, in effect, that he was finally facing it.

Not everyone can make Ngũgĩ’s choice, and the diaspora rarely gets choices that clean. But the manual has one weakness running through every chapter, which is that every method requires the speaker’s cooperation. Force needs your fear. Shame needs your ear. Even love needs your calculation.

Every phrase taught to a child, every name pronounced in full, every song not translated for the room’s comfort, every sentence spoken in the “useless” language exactly where it is least useful: each one is a small withdrawal of that cooperation. Not nostalgia. Refusal.

Because a language is not preserved in dictionaries. It is preserved in the decision, made daily, that there is still someone worth speaking it to.

Not because the old words are sacred. But because they are the only ones that remember you.

Leave a comment

Which language is going quiet in your family, and who was the last person you heard speak it fully? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

As captured in fan footage and widely reported afterwards, Carpenter leaned into the microphone and said, “I think I heard someone yodel. Is that what you’re doing? I don’t like it.” The fan called back that it was their culture, to which she replied, “That’s your culture… is yodeling?” and when they explained that it was a call, a celebration, she added, “Is this Burning Man? What’s going on? This is weird.”

The clip travelled the way clips do, and by the next day Carpenter had apologised on social media explaining that she hadn’t seen the person, couldn’t hear clearly, and that her reaction was “pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended.” She had since learned what a zaghrouta is, she said, and would “welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out.”

But notice something in its final line: even in the act of apologising, the zaghrouta was filed back under yodels, which means the correction happened inside the original misunderstanding. She had learned the word, but the category hadn’t moved.

And in the replies underneath, a second layer unfolded, some defending the fan, some defending the singer, and some doing something older and uglier, mocking the sound itself and the culture it came from, confirming in writing exactly what the moment on stage had only implied. One misheard trill, and suddenly an entire tradition was on trial for being weird.

This essay is not about Sabrina Carpenter, who was, at worst, unprepared. It is about the mechanism her unpreparedness exposed, because if you have ever lived between cultures, you recognised that mechanism instantly, and you have almost certainly been inside it.

Everyone has stood where that fan stood

Think of the lunchbox opened at school, when the smell of your grandmother’s cooking became a punchline before you’d taken a single bite, or the name your parents chose with care, mispronounced twice and then quietly abandoned in favour of the inevitable do you have a nickname? Think of the accent imitated in the meeting, affectionately, they’d insist, of the music turned down before colleagues arrive, of the celebration you find yourself explaining apologetically before it has even begun, pre-translating your own joy so that the room won’t flinch.

The setting changes; school, workplace, festival crowd but the sequence never does. Something arrives that the room has no category for, and instead of the room admitting that its repertoire is incomplete, you become the anomaly; the gap in their knowledge is quietly reassigned as a flaw in your presence.

Look again at what happened on that stage, because the sequence is forensically clean. A sound arrives that doesn’t fit the listener’s repertoire, and the first move is translation into the nearest available category, which in this case was yodelling. The second move is judgement ‘’I don’t like it ‘’ and only third, and only because someone insisted, with four seconds of courage shouted across a festival crowd, comes the possibility that the sound carried a meaning the listener couldn’t yet hear.

Categorise, judge, and then, maybe, understand.

That sequence is how misrecognition usually works, not as hostility, but as a failure of repertoire delivered with total confidence. “This is weird” sounds like a description of the thing itself, when it is actually a measurement of the distance between the thing and the listener, announced, every time, as though the deficiency belonged to the thing.

The sociologist Michèle Lamont, whose work on recognition I’ve written about before, argues that recognising an injury requires first recognising the dignity of those carrying it. What was caught on camera at Coachella is the inverse of that principle operating in real time: when dignity isn’t yet visible, the injury isn’t either, and the fan’s culture could be dismissed so casually precisely because, in that arena and in that moment, it hadn’t yet been seen.

So let us do the seeing. What was that sound?

The oldest sound of joy

A zaghrouta (Arabic: زغرودة; plural zaghareet) is a long, wavering, high-pitched trill, a cascade of rapid “li-li-li” oscillations, loud enough to fill a wedding hall and designed to do exactly that. English calls the broader family of such sounds ululation, a practice found in many forms across Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia, and the zaghrouta is its specifically Arab and North African form, with its own occasions, its own etiquette, and its own line of inheritance.

Even the word imitates the sound. It comes from the Arabic root z-gh-r-d (ز-غ-ر-د), from the verb zagharada, to trill, a root generally understood as onomatopoeic and here is a small marvel, because the English word took exactly the same path. Ululation descends from the Latin ululare, to howl or cry out, kin to ulula, the owl, which means that two languages, continents apart, both surrendered to the sound and simply spelled what they heard. The names vary by region, zaghrouta in the Levant and Gulf, zalghouta in parts of Lebanon and Egypt, youyou across the Maghreb but the trill is the same wherever you stand.

Its roots reach back before Islam, to pre-Islamic Arabia, where accounts describe women performing it collectively in ritual, in invocations for rain and mercy, and raising it on battlefields to stir courage, which settles two things at once. It is not “pagan” as an accusation, though it is older than the religions that later carried it, and it belongs to no single faith: you will hear zaghareet in Muslim, Christian, Druze and Jewish Arab communities alike, because the sound predates the borders people now use to file it.

And it has always been women’s sound. Traditionally the zaghrouta is the domain of women, girls learning it from mothers and aunties, older women commanding it with a virtuosity that carries real prestige and as one Lebanese writer put it, the zalghouta puts women at the forefront of an occasion and makes them the masters of its atmosphere. In cultures where women’s public voices have so often been policed, here is a sound that is theirs by right: the loudest thing in the room, unapologetic, and honoured for being so.

You have likely heard it without knowing. Egyptian cinema has recorded wedding zaghareet since the 1940s, and Palestinian wedding song cycles are threaded with them, while in Palestine the trill has also carried into protest, becoming a sound of collective defiance as much as of joy. Xena’s famous warrior cry from 1990s television was adapted from an Arabic ululation the actress heard performed at a funeral, and at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, Shakira, whose father is Lebanese, turned to the camera mid-performance and let one fly in front of a hundred million people. Half the internet asked what the strange tongue thing was; the other half heard home.

For celebration and for mourning

Here is what almost every explainer published after Coachella got wrong or left out entirely: the zaghrouta is not simply the sound of happiness.

Yes, it announces the couple entering the wedding hall, where the moment they appear the ululating begins, often as a joyful contest between the two families. Yes, it greets a newborn, a graduate, pilgrims returning safely from Hajj to houses decorated with lights and palm leaves. And in the diaspora it does something more tender still, because it is the sound that turns a rented function room in London or Montreal, for one evening, into a Levantine wedding, an acoustic homeland, carried in the body, deployable anywhere.

But the zaghrouta also appears at funerals, where it is raised to honour the dead and in some communities, specifically at the funeral of someone who died young and unmarried, the women perform the zaghareet the deceased never received at a wedding.

Sit with that for a moment: the same sound for the wedding that was and the wedding that will never be. Here is a culture that looks at its cruelest grief and answers it with the sound of celebration, not to deny the loss but to insist that this life, too, deserved its trill of honour.

So the zaghrouta does not mean happiness, exactly. It means magnitude, this moment is too large for words, so the body will speak instead. That is what was in the air at Coachella when it was filed under “weird.”

What the sound does to the body

The zaghrouta is a genuine skill. The voice sustains a single loud, high note while the tongue flicks rapidly against the palate, chopping the sound into its shimmering trill, and the diaphragm drives breath against that resistance, which is why each burst lasts only seconds before the lungs demand more. It is learned the way all embodied inheritance is learned by watching, by trying, by being corrected at family gatherings until one day it comes out right and the aunties turn their heads and doing it well carries status. It is a lineage you carry in the muscles of your mouth.

And it does something to the people who make it. We know from the broader science of the voice that loud, sustained, communal vocalisation, singing, chanting, collective calls is associated with emotional release, with the easing of stress, and with the powerful sense of fusion that comes from many bodies producing one sound. The zaghrouta is this principle in its most concentrated form: a burst of pure voice with no lyrics to compose and no melody to rehearse, just breath and feeling converted directly into sound, flooding the moment and summoning every other woman in the room to answer, trill calling to trill, until the emotion belongs to everyone.

Which is precisely why it needs no translation to be felt.

The information was never missing from the sound. It was missing from the listener.

Four seconds of courage

Which brings us back to the fan in the crowd, who had no stage, no microphone and no time, only four seconds and the nerve to use them. It’s my culture. Strip away the festival lights and that sentence is something anyone who has lived between worlds will recognise: a bid for dignity, compressed to its minimum viable form, which is what explaining yourself sounds like when the room has already ruled and you are appealing the verdict in real time.

Most of these moments end differently than this one did. There is no viral clip of the lunchbox, no apology tweeted the morning after the meeting; the verdict simply stands, and you learn to pre-translate, to turn the music down, to bring a different lunch. The injury goes unrecognised, not because it isn’t real, but because, as I keep finding, the language and the recognition haven’t caught up with the experience.

Carpenter learned a word that weekend, and to her credit she said so. But learning the word is the smallest part. The deeper work for her, for the crowd that laughed, for all of us in rooms where someone else’s joy arrives unannounced is learning to hold the first “this is weird” in the mouth, unspoken, long enough to ask a better question: what am I not yet able to hear?

Because a sound doesn’t need to be understood to deserve to be recognised. The zaghrouta was never weird. It was simply louder, older, and surer of itself than the room that mistook it for a yodel.

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When was your joy, your food, your name, your music, your celebration, heard as 'weird'?

I'd love to read your story in the comments.

At some point, the loudest voice in your head stops being your own.

What replaces it is a composite of everyone else’s expectations about how you should sound and how much room you are allowed to take up, and it speaks to you in the second person, telling you where to soften, when to explain yourself, how far to pull back to stay acceptable. The strange thing is that it never feels like an intrusion. It feels like you.

This is what I’ve come to call the Borrowed Gaze: the moment other people’s expectations stop being something outside you and become the voice you think with.

There is always a first moment when you realise you are not simply living, but being read.

Maybe yours was at school, or in a meeting room, an interview, a dinner table, a playground. Mine were never dramatic, which is exactly what made them so difficult to name, usually just something small, like a question asked a little too casually or a pause after I’d spoken or a look that made me suddenly conscious of my own voice. Nothing hostile, nothing I could have objected to without sounding strange, and yet enough to lift me out of the moment and set me beside it, watching, wondering how I was being heard.

That question, once it arrives, doesn’t leave. From then on you are never only in the room; you are also above it somewhere, listening to yourself speak and adjusting as you go, working to stay legible and easy to place.

For a long time I assumed this was just what adapting felt like, the ordinary cost of becoming socially fluent, of learning how to move through the world and it took me years to see that it was something more particular than that, and longer still to find any words for it. I could feel the thing clearly enough. I simply had no name to hang on it.

The name came sideways, through writers who weren’t describing migration at all but who were describing what happens to a self that is formed under watching. And this is where my own sense of the work shifted. I used to say I was interested in the psychology of migration, the private weather of moving between worlds, but that was never quite it.

What I am actually doing, what this whole project is, is taking social theory, the cool abstract machinery that sociologists and philosophers built to explain how power and perception work, and translating it back down into the temperature of a lived life.

The most personal thing you carry usually turns out to be structural. Seeing the structure is what lets you stop believing you were the flaw.

The Split

The earliest version of this I know comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in 1903, in an America that had abolished slavery without touching the hierarchy underneath it. He wasn’t theorising from above. He was a Black intellectual making his way through institutions that held him as belonging and not-belonging in the same instant, and what he set out to describe was not the inequality itself but what it is like to live inside one, the doubling it forces on a person. He called it double consciousness: the condition of always seeing yourself through two sets of eyes at once, your own and the ones a society lends you whether you want them or not.

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

I had to put the book down when I first read that line. It didn’t land as an argument. It landed as recognition.

The division he names runs straight through the middle of a person. You are living your life, talking, moving, simply being there and at the same time you are off to the side appraising it, clocking how it is going over. It trails you into every room, this faint second self, and most of your quiet energy goes into trying to fold the two back into one.

Anyone who has moved countries knows the shape of this even when the particulars are nothing alike. Somewhere you are fluent and easy and entirely yourself, and then you cross into somewhere else and a dial turns, you grow more careful, more edited and after enough crossings you find you are carrying both selves around at once, the one you are and the one being received. That is where the Borrowed Gaze starts to set.

Awareness never just sits there as awareness; it tips over into influence. Noticing how you are seen slides into bracing for it, then into arranging yourself around it before anyone has looked.

The Split Enters The Body

Du Bois names the split. Frantz Fanon shows you the moment it stops being a thought and lodges in the body.

Fanon was a psychiatrist trained in France, writing in the wreckage of colonialism, living between Martinique and France and later Algeria, fluent and accomplished in every room he entered and still flattened into a type before he had said a word. His question was not whether inequality existed but what it does to a mind subjected to it, not once or now and then but as a steady condition. He describes the point at which you stop meeting difference as something out there and begin to wear it, to see yourself precisely as you are seen, and he is exact about where it happens: in the body. Your posture corrects itself. You become conscious of the space you fill. The voice goes careful, choosing words less to say a thing than to steer how the thing will be taken.

“I am overdetermined from without.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

That is what makes him so hard to shake. What looks from outside like a bit of social unease is, underneath, a rewiring, identity ceasing to be a fixed point and becoming something you negotiate moment to moment, tuned to whoever is in front of you.

Du Bois leaves you aware of the split; Fanon drives it below thought, until you don’t merely notice how you are seen but feel it land, in your tone, in the catch before you answer, in how you come through a door.

The Watcher You Carry

Which leaves the obvious next question. What happens when watching yourself becomes so routine that you no longer catch yourself at it?

This is where I think of Michel Foucault, who spent his career tracing how modern power works less by force than by being looked at. In Discipline and Punish he poses a plain question, how do you get people to behave without standing over them and his answer is that you don’t. You arrange things so they feel they could be watched at any moment, and you let that feeling do the labour. His emblem for it is the panopticon, a prison built so one guard in a central tower could see into every cell while no prisoner could ever tell when the eye was actually on them. What fascinated him wasn’t the surveillance but its by-product: convinced you might be seen at any second, you start conducting yourself as though you always are, and eventually the guard can go home, because by then you have taken the post yourself.

“He becomes the principle of his own subjection.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)

This is the Borrowed Gaze at full strength, because here it no longer requires anybody outside you. The watcher loses its face. The audience thins out into something general and unplaceable, nowhere in particular and therefore everywhere, threaded through your choices and your tone and the half-beat before you commit to a sentence. The question even changes its wording. It used to be how are they seeing me; now there is no they to point at, so it becomes how should I adjust and you find yourself bracing for a verdict before it comes, adapting before anyone asks, editing before there is anything to misread, until none of it is a decision anymore and all of it is simply how you are.

The Arc

Lay the three of them next to each other and a shape lifts off the page, and you see that this was never really a story about migration. It is a story about what observation does to a self, and migration only speeds the thing up and turns up its volume and makes it that much harder to get out from under.

So the Borrowed Gaze isn’t one moment but a slow progression. It opens as awareness, you clock how you come across. It settles into internalisation, you start to feel that appraisal in your body and your voice and your presence in a room. And it finishes as automation, the stage where you manage yourself without any thought at all, which is the dangerous part, because by then it has stopped feeling like a behaviour and started feeling like a personality.

How it actually shows up

It rarely declares itself. It lives in small habits instead: the sentence you trim before it leaves your mouth, the opinion you sand down before offering it, the joke you decide against because you can’t predict the landing, the formality you reach for in one room and the near-invisibility you settle into in another, the over-explaining, the over-preparing, the wish to be past all criticism before you have even started.

Perhaps this is why I used to run conversations back hours after they ended, never because something had gone wrong, only because some part of me was still asking whether I had sounded right, whether I had said too much, whether I had taken up more space than I was owed.

If you have crossed borders, you have almost certainly felt this, the held second before you speak while you test the sentence in your head, the sudden audibility of your own accent, the small choice to simplify or soften or over-explain, made not because anyone demanded it but because at some point you worked out it would smooth the way.

And that is what makes the thing so slippery to catch: it almost never feels like harm. It feels capable. Mature. The trouble is that social intelligence and chronic self-editing can look identical from the outside, and so can sensitivity and self-erasure, and so can code-switching you reach for by choice and code-switching you reach for to survive, and plenty of us live in that blur for years without ever naming which one we’re doing. To change countries is not only to arrive somewhere new but to step into a new field of perception, one that has already understood you before you open your mouth, so you learn fast to read the room and move ahead of it.

The cost

There is a price for all this managing, and though it rarely shows, it adds up, the steady silt of tiny corrections and held-back impulses and small refusals to take up room, the labour of staying legible in places that were never laid out with you in mind. What it leaves behind is a specific exhaustion, not the body’s kind but the kind that comes from tracking how you are coming across at the same time as trying to simply live.

For some people it means saying less. For others it means becoming unusually polished, or agreeable, or high-performing and easy to work with, partly because that is who they are, and partly because those qualities file down friction. Which is the uncomfortable truth underneath it: the thing migrants tend to get rewarded for is not their authenticity but the quality of their adaptation, and the more that adaptation pays, the harder it becomes to find the seam where you stop and the performance starts. You go smooth. Not because there’s nothing sharp in you. But because somewhere along the line you learned that smooth was the safer way to be.

The work

None of this belongs to migration alone. It turns up wherever a self runs into an expectation, at work, across class lines, inside the scripts of gender, anywhere at all that belonging comes with conditions and migration only drags it into the light, because you are forever moving between worlds and hauling each one’s gaze along behind you.

So maybe the task isn’t to wish the Borrowed Gaze away, since for a lot of us it once did real work; it got us through rooms we didn’t yet know how to stand in. The task is quieter and harder than that. It’s catching the moment the borrowed voice has gone louder than your own, the moment caution curdles into erasure, awareness into surveillance, adaptation into a slow drift away from yourself because being thoughtful and being constrained are not the same thing, even when they wear the same face, and learning to tell them apart may be most of what becoming a modern migrant actually means.

Which is finally where the whole thing has been heading, and what I keep circling back to in this work: theory can hand you the name of the structure, but only you can feel where it has settled in your own throat. Which parts of me are mine, and which got shaped by other people’s pressure and my own long hunger to belong, and after all these years, which voice do I actually want to keep living by?

The Borrowed Gaze begins with other people. The unlearning of it has to begin with us.

I first talked this idea through on the podcast back in April, a full episode where I braid my own experience of being watched with what Du Bois, Fanon and Foucault each saw in it. If the essay landed, the conversation goes further.

Listen to the episode → The Borrowed Gaze: When Other People’s Judgment Becomes Your Inner Voice

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Before reading it, I had assumed my experience was simply the ordinary cost of migration. You move countries, learn new languages, adapt to unfamiliar customs, collect qualifications, build a career, and slowly learn how to inhabit a place that was not originally yours. Over time, you become fluent not only in the language but also in the social codes, the references, the habits and expectations that signal belonging. Most of the time, it works well enough that you stop thinking about it.

Until a moment arrives that reminds you there is still a difference between being included and being seen as fully belonging.

Until someone hears you speaking your home language and tells you to go back where you came from. But if I’m honest, those moments were never the ones that stayed with me. What lingered were the subtler encounters: the patronising smile, the joke that wasn’t quite a joke, the assumption that I should feel lucky simply to be there. There was often an invisible script running underneath the interaction, one that seemed to say: work hard, be grateful, don’t be too ambitious. For years, I wasn’t sure which was worse, the bluntness of open xenophobia or the quieter form of exclusion that arrives dressed as courtesy and takes much longer to understand.

I was born in Bulgaria, spent my earliest years in Spain, grew up in France and moved to Britain after university.

By the time someone asks me where I’m from, I already know we are entering complicated territory.

The question itself is innocent enough.

“Where are you from?”

What follows usually requires a timeline rather than an answer. I was born there, then moved there, then grew up somewhere else, before eventually building a life somewhere entirely different. By the time I reach the end of the explanation, I can often sense a certain dissatisfaction, as though I have somehow failed to provide the information that was being requested. And then comes the follow-up question.

“No, but where were you born?”

At that moment, the conversation shifts. We are no longer talking about identity as something lived, accumulated or constructed over time. We are talking about origins.

The birth certificate has entered the conversation.

For many migrants, birthplace carries a peculiar authority. You can spend decades in a country, speak its language more fluently than your own, absorb its customs, build friendships, careers and families there, yet the place where you first entered the world often remains, in the eyes of others, the most important fact about you.

Try saying you are French.

Try saying you are British.

Sooner or later, the question returns.

“Yes, but where were you born?”

As though identity were less a biography than a point of departure.

For a long time, I found this frustrating. Now I find it revealing. The question is rarely about geography. More often, it is an attempt to locate someone within a story that feels familiar and legible. The difficulty is that some of us no longer fit neatly into a single one.

And perhaps that is the quiet burden of migration: not that you belong nowhere, but that your answer no longer fits the categories other people expect.

Sometimes it can feel like the birthplace becomes both the opening and closing line of the story, the beginning and the end. The birth and death sentence of the foreigner.

For a long time, I thought the answer lay somewhere in the Cold War.

How else do you explain the strange status of Eastern Europe within the European imagination? We grew up with a set of stories about the region, stories about communism, backwardness, instability and catching up with the West. Even after the political systems changed, the narratives seemed to linger, passed from one generation to the next almost unnoticed.

Reading Ivan Kalmar felt like discovering that the story was both larger and older than I had imagined.

His book, White But Not Quite, explores the peculiar position Eastern Europeans occupy within Europe itself. Not quite outsiders, yet rarely treated as insiders. European, but somehow with an asterisk attached. What fascinated me was the way he connected questions of identity to questions of power, showing how entire regions, much like individuals, become trapped inside stories they did not write.

One observation stayed with me more than any other:

People become more or less acceptable depending on where they sit within systems of prestige, power and historical status.

The more I sat with that idea, the more it seemed to explain not only geopolitics, but something much closer to home.

We tend to talk about belonging as though it were the natural reward for effort.

Learn the language, understand the culture, participate in society, contribute economically, follow the rules, and eventually the feeling of being an outsider will dissolve. ‘‘Integration’’ , in this version of the story, is presented almost like a contract: fulfil your obligations and belonging will follow.

Yet very few people experience belonging in such a straightforward way.

What Kalmar’s work reveals is that belonging is not simply a personal achievement; it is also shaped by history, power and collective imagination.

Some identities arrive carrying centuries of prestige behind them, reinforced by institutions, cultural narratives and assumptions so deeply embedded that they become almost invisible. Others arrive burdened by stories they did not create and may not even be aware of, stories about where they come from, what they represent and where they supposedly sit within an unspoken hierarchy of value.

The hierarchy is rarely visible to those who occupy its more comfortable positions. In fact, one of its defining features is how natural it appears from the inside. But spend enough time on its margins and you begin to notice the small ways in which recognition is distributed unevenly, the subtle distinctions between being welcomed and being respected, between being present and being perceived as fully belonging.

This is where Kalmar’s argument becomes particularly interesting.

One of his central claims is that Eastern Europe, as we understand it today, is not merely a geographical reality waiting to be discovered on a map, but also a cultural and political construction that has been repeatedly reinvented over time. The image of Eastern Europe as Europe’s backward cousin, perpetually catching up, less modern, less democratic and somehow less complete than the West, is often treated as though it were a timeless truth. Kalmar challenges that assumption, arguing that many of these characteristics are not ancient realities but relatively recent narratives that became solidified during the twentieth century, particularly during and after the Cold War.

What struck me was not simply the historical argument itself, although it is a compelling one.

It was the recognition that entire regions can become trapped inside stories in much the same way that individuals can.

A stereotype repeated often enough begins to feel like common sense. A narrative inherited across generations starts to resemble reality.

And perhaps that is what stayed with me most after reading the book.

Beneath the history, the politics and the shifting definitions of East and West lies something much more human: the experience of being seen through a story that you did not write, yet somehow find yourself expected to inhabit.

What stayed with me most after reading Kalmar was the recognition that beneath the history, the shifting borders and the political arguments lies a much older and more human story about recognition itself.

When communism collapsed, millions of people across Central and Eastern Europe believed they were not only entering a new economic system but also returning to a shared European home. The walls had fallen, borders were opening, democracies were emerging, and with them came the promise of something larger than prosperity. The expectation was that political inclusion would eventually translate into social equality; that participation would lead to recognition; that once the divide had disappeared on the map, it would gradually disappear in people’s minds.

Yet Kalmar’s work suggests that history rarely moves so neatly.

Many Eastern Europeans found themselves welcomed into the European project while continuing to occupy an ambiguous position within it, simultaneously inside and outside, included but not entirely embraced. They became part of the story, yet often in the role of the apprentice rather than the author, the student rather than the equal. The distinction may appear subtle from a distance, but anyone who has experienced it knows how consequential it can become.

Because recognition operates differently from citizenship, economics or law.

A passport can be issued overnight. Recognition often takes generations.

The longer I sat with Kalmar’s argument, the less it felt like a story about Eastern Europe and the more it felt like a story about migration itself. Many migrants know what it means to spend years constructing a life in a country, learning its language, absorbing its references, contributing to its economy, building friendships, careers and families, only to discover that belonging does not arrive as a reward for effort. Instead, it remains something negotiated, revised and occasionally withdrawn, shaped not only by what we do but by the stories others continue to tell about us.

What interests me, ultimately, is the psychological aftermath of this condition.

What happens when the identity you have spent decades building is recognised only partially by the world around you? What happens when you realise that acceptance and recognition are not synonyms, and that it is entirely possible to be included while still feeling somehow peripheral to the narrative? At what point does the tension between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others become part of our identity in its own right?

Perhaps this is where much of the migrant experience becomes difficult to explain. It is not necessarily a story of exclusion. In many cases, the challenge is more subtle than that. It is the experience of existing in the space between acceptance and recognition, between participation and belonging, between being welcomed and being understood.

And yet, for all the confusion it can create, there is another side to living between worlds.

Moving between countries has made me attentive to the invisible systems that shape identity.

It has taught me that cultures are not natural, that national stories are not inevitable, and that many of the assumptions people inherit about themselves and others are far more fragile than they appear. Existing between worlds forces you to become an observer, not by choice but by necessity. You learn to notice what others overlook because you are constantly translating between different ways of seeing.

Perhaps that is the unexpected gift hidden inside fractured belonging.

When you never fit entirely within a single story, you begin to see that stories themselves are constructions: narratives assembled over time, repeated until they feel permanent, inherited until they resemble truth.

Kalmar’s book is, in many ways, about the stories Europe tells about itself. Reading it left me wondering about the stories we inherit about ourselves.

And whether the work of a life is not to find the story we belong to, but to decide which ones we are willing to keep.

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Racial Identity. National identity. Cultural identity. Personal identity. Professional identity.

The word appears everywhere, yet the more we try to define it, the more unstable it becomes.

Identity is one of those concepts that feels obvious until you begin examining it closely. Then suddenly, what seemed solid starts dissolving under inspection.

Even the etymology of the word reveals a contradiction at its core.

Identity refers to “the distinguishing character or personality of an individual,” the qualities that make someone unique. Yet the Latin word identitas means sameness.

This paradox sits at the centre of the human experience.

How can identity simultaneously mean:

• what makes you different,

• and what makes you the same?

How can it describe individuality while also referring to continuity and resemblance?

Perhaps because identity has never been entirely personal.

Human beings define themselves through relationship:
through culture,
through memory,
through geography,
through language,
through recognition from others.

We become ourselves partly through distinction, but also through belonging.

This is why identity often feels so psychologically fragile. We are constantly negotiating between the need to remain singular and the need to remain connected.

Too much individuality creates isolation.
Too much sameness erases the self.

Identity lives somewhere between the two.

The Self Was Always Partly Performed

The language surrounding identity has always carried something theatrical within it.

The word “character” comes from the Greek kharakter; an engraved mark or written sign. A theatrical character is not a person in the literal sense, but a construction made from gestures, dialogue, symbols, and interpretation.

And perhaps the same is true for all of us.

No identity exists in isolation.

A person only becomes socially “real” through interaction with others. Identity is shaped through the way we are perceived, mirrored, interpreted, and emotionally received.

Even the word “person” comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask.

Not because identity is fake, but because human beings have always existed through forms of embodiment and social performance. Different environments draw out different versions of the self. Different spaces require different expressions of identity.

The version of you that exists with family may not fully resemble the version that exists professionally. The person you become in one country may not survive intact in another. Different languages can even alter emotional expression itself.

Identity is therefore never fixed.

It is relational.

Fluid.

Contextual.

Migration Reveals What Identity Really Is

Migration exposes this instability with brutal clarity.

The migrant exists on the threshold between worlds, suspended between the society left behind and the one still trying to be inhabited.

This is why migration is never simply geographical relocation.

It is identity reorganisation.

The body moves physically, but the mind must renegotiate its entire relationship with space:
new sounds,
new smells,
new social codes,
new rhythms,
new meanings attached to the body itself.

Human beings do not only inhabit physical spaces. They also live inside emotional, cultural, and psychological spaces.

And when those spaces change, identity changes too.

This explains why displacement often produces something deeper than homesickness.

A sense of exile emerges when the mind can no longer reconcile itself with the surrounding world.

And exile is not limited to immigrants.

A person can feel exiled inside a profession that no longer reflects them.
Inside a relationship where they feel emotionally invisible.
Inside a city they once loved.
Inside a former version of themselves.

Exile begins when inner reality and external reality stop recognising each other.

Identity Requires Openness

The French poet René Char once wrote:

“Épouse et n’épouse pas ta maison.”
“Marry and do not marry your house.”

The line feels almost paradoxical, yet it captures something essential about identity.

The “house” can be understood as the psychological self; the mental structure that gives continuity and coherence to existence. Human beings need this internal home in order to feel stable.

But there is also danger in becoming trapped inside it.

Too much attachment to a fixed identity creates rigidity. It closes the self off from transformation, complexity, and encounter with others.

Identity requires a double movement:
the ability to remain connected to oneself,
and the willingness to leave space for the Other within oneself.

Without openness, identity hardens into something defensive.

Without continuity, identity fragments entirely.

A healthy identity is neither fixed nor dissolved. It remains permeable.

The “I” Is Never Entirely Singular

In theatre, every line spoken operates on two levels simultaneously. A character speaks to another character, but also to the audience witnessing the performance.

The result is that the pronoun “I” becomes unstable.

The “I” no longer belongs solely to the character. It becomes shared between author, actor, director, and spectator.

Perhaps identity works similarly in life.

The self we call “I” is never entirely self-created.

It contains fragments of:
family,
language,
culture,
memory,
history,
migration,
desire,
trauma,
love,
and every environment that has shaped perception.

Identity is therefore never singular.

It is layered.

A negotiation between internal and external worlds.

This is why modern identity often feels exhausting. Contemporary life forces people to navigate multiple selves simultaneously:
professional selves,
digital selves,
private selves,
cultural selves,
aspirational selves.

The old fantasy of one stable, permanent identity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

Why Modern Life Makes Identity Feel Fragile

Globalisation has accelerated identity instability.

People move more. Reinvent themselves more. Change careers more. Cross social classes more frequently. Live between cultures, languages, and value systems.

Yet psychologically, many still expect identity to feel fixed.

So whenever transformation occurs, people panic.

They interpret evolution as inconsistency.

But perhaps identity was never meant to remain static.

Perhaps instability is not evidence of failure, but evidence that identity is alive.

Human beings are not monuments.

They are processes.

And maybe maturity is not becoming one fixed person forever.

Maybe maturity is developing the capacity to remain coherent while continuing to evolve.

To build a mental home without becoming imprisoned inside it.

To belong somewhere without needing to reject every other version of oneself.

Because identity is not a final answer to the question “Who am I?”

It is the ongoing negotiation between who we have been, who we are becoming, and the worlds through which we move.

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What version of yourself only exists in certain places? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Seeing Kimberlé Crenshaw and together, especially against the backdrop of everything unfolding globally right now, gave me something I have struggled to hold onto recently: hope.

Not naïve hope. Not the kind built on optimism alone. But the quieter kind that emerges when people continue to insist on clarity, truth, and humanity even when the world seems determined to move backwards.

Afua introduced Professor Crenshaw by saying she has produced “shared language for the complex world” and that even if you do not know her name, you are already participating in a world she helped shape.

That stayed with me.

Because some people do not simply contribute ideas. They alter the architecture of how society understands itself. They give language to experiences that previously existed only as tension, contradiction, or silent exhaustion inside people’s lives.

And once language exists, something shifts.

You can no longer pretend not to see.

Professor Crenshaw reflected on an earlier experience preparing and rehearsing for a new play, describing it as “the becoming of a narrative.” But following parental complaints, the production was cancelled, making way once again for the “dominant racial narrative.”

That phrase lingered heavily in the room.

The dominant narrative does not only erase stories. It exhausts people into constantly rationalising their own experiences. Crenshaw spoke about the “afterlife encounter” of these moments, the way society’s reactions become internal dialogue long after the original event has passed.

That felt painfully familiar.

How often do people from racialised, migrant or in-between identities spend years translating themselves back to themselves? Trying to determine whether what they experienced was real enough to deserve grief, anger, or acknowledgment?

One phrase in particular has not left me since:

“The loss of the loss.”

Not just losing progress itself, but losing the memory that progress ever existed. Watching rights, visibility, empathy, or representation quietly recede until people begin treating regression as normal. The deeper danger is not only the loss itself, but the domino effect it creates: how quickly diminished rights reshape expectations, narrow imagination, and make people forget what once felt possible.

There was also another truth she articulated with devastating precision:

“Deep connections are not protective against hatred.”

It challenged the comforting belief that proximity alone creates understanding. That simply knowing one another is enough to overcome systems, conditioning, or fear. History repeatedly shows otherwise.

And then perhaps the line that felt most urgent of all:

“We is less of a noun, but a verb.”

Not something stable. Not something guaranteed.

Something we must continuously practice.

Build.

Choose.

Protect.

Maybe that is what I carried home with me most strongly that evening: the reminder that language itself is an act of survival. That naming experiences creates possibility. And that in moments where the world feels increasingly fragmented, people like Crenshaw continue to give us frameworks not only to understand injustice, but to understand ourselves within it.

For those of us living between identities, cultures, histories, and expectations, that matters deeply.

Because sometimes the beginning of belonging is simply hearing someone articulate the thing you thought only existed inside you.

As for the atmosphere, gatherings like this are usually marked by silence. The kind where you can hear a pin drop because people are carefully absorbing every word.

But this felt different.

Every statement, every observation, every truth spoken by Crenshaw was followed by a collective murmur across the room. Nods. Soft laughter of recognition. A loud and instinctive “mhm,” the kind that really means: yes, exactly.

Not performance. Recognition.

It felt as though the audience was not simply listening, but locating themselves inside the conversation in real time.

For a moment, strangers became emotionally synchronized.

We were all in sync.

And maybe that was the most powerful part of the evening. Not just hearing language for complex experiences, but witnessing what happens when people realise they are not carrying those experiences alone.

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Were you there that evening? I would love to know what stayed with you most. Sometimes the most powerful part of these conversations is realising how differently and similarly we carry them afterwards.

Not only because she was born in Russia and later became one of France’s most important literary voices, but because so much of her work feels concerned with something difficult to explain and yet deeply familiar to many migrants, third culture children, and people who have lived between identities for long enough: the subtle psychological movement of the self.

Sarraute spent her childhood moving between Russia and France after her parents divorced. She later wrote Enfance as a dialogue between split selves, almost as though memory itself could only be accessed through multiple interior voices speaking to one another across time.

That idea stayed with me.

Because I increasingly believe migration creates not only external displacement, but internal multiplicity.

We often speak about migration through visible realities:
borders, passports, visas, languages, careers, adaptation.

But far less attention is given to the quieter psychological experience underneath all of it.

What happens internally when your life unfolds across multiple countries, cultural systems, emotional realities, and versions of yourself?

What happens when identity itself becomes fluid?

Sarraute had a word for subtle interior psychological movements that exist just beneath language and consciousness. She called them tropisms: those almost imperceptible emotional shifts that shape our reactions, gestures, identities, and relationships before we even fully understand them ourselves.

I think migrants live inside tropisms constantly.

Tiny emotional negotiations.
Invisible calibrations.
Micro-adjustments of selfhood.

The slight pause before deciding which language to answer in.
The instinct to soften an accent in certain environments.
The awareness that different versions of you become legible in different places.

Not dramatic enough to name as trauma.
Not visible enough to explain easily.

But psychologically exhausting over time.

Because migration often teaches people to become emotionally multilingual.

To read rooms carefully.
To sense expectations quickly.
To anticipate misunderstanding before it arrives.

And eventually, many people become so fluent in adaptation that they lose track of where performance ends and identity begins.

This is partly why I keep returning to the idea of conditional belonging.

The feeling that acceptance depends on how understandable, adaptable, useful, successful, integrated, or culturally fluent you can make yourself.

You belong, but often with invisible conditions attached.

Migration simply makes this negotiation more visible.

But I think many people experience forms of conditional belonging throughout life:
within families, social classes, workplaces, relationships, motherhood, creative ambition, or even gender itself.

There are environments where only certain parts of us feel acceptable.

And over time, we learn how to self-edit accordingly.

We become shape-shifters.

What fascinates me is how rarely this fragmentation is discussed psychologically.

There is so much language around achievement and reinvention, but very little language around what it feels like internally to become psychologically divided between worlds.

Because migration changes more than geography.

It changes memory.
Identity.
Belonging.
The emotional map through which we experience ourselves.

I once came across the idea that your country of origin becomes an internal map you continue navigating through long after you leave it.

That feels true to me.

Even after years abroad, certain emotional reflexes remain tied to the place where your identity was first formed. Certain cultural instincts remain embedded in the nervous system. Certain versions of yourself continue existing in relationship to places you no longer inhabit physically.

And yet migration complicates that map too.

Because eventually, the internal landscape no longer fully matches any singular external reality.

You become divided between emotional geographies.

Home exists in fragments.

A language here.
A memory there.
A former self still attached to a particular city, relationship, or season of life.

Perhaps this is why returning “home” after living abroad for many years can feel so psychologically strange.

People often imagine nostalgia as a desire to return unchanged to something unchanged.

But migration reveals that neither place nor self remains stable over time.

You return carrying new identities that your old environment may not fully recognise.

And your old environment still reflects versions of yourself you no longer entirely inhabit.

This creates a subtle but profound disorientation.

You realise belonging is not static.

It is relational.
Fluid.
Negotiated.

And perhaps this is what many migrants struggle to articulate: not simply homesickness, but identity displacement.

The unsettling awareness that no single version of yourself fully contains the whole story anymore.

Sarraute’s work interests me because she resisted rigid literary categories in the same way many migrants resist rigid identity categories.

Her writing often dissolved stable characters, clear plots, or fixed psychological certainties. Instead, she focused on movement itself: fleeting sensations, unstable perceptions, emotional undercurrents existing beneath socially constructed surfaces.

In many ways, migration destabilises identity similarly.

The self becomes porous.

Less fixed.
Less singular.
More aware of its own adaptability.

And although modern culture often celebrates reinvention, I think there is a hidden grief inside continuous adaptation too.

Because every transformation asks something to be left behind.

A former language.
A previous certainty.
An older version of selfhood that only existed inside a particular emotional and cultural environment.

This is why I increasingly think of migrants as border-dwellers psychologically, not only geographically.

People living within thresholds.

Between cultures.
Between selves.
Between memory and reinvention.
Between adaptation and authenticity.

And perhaps this is why so many migrants eventually become highly observant people.

When you spend enough time navigating multiple systems of belonging, you become sensitive to invisible social codes others move through unconsciously.

You notice tone shifts.
Power structures.
The emotional architecture of rooms.

You learn that belonging is often shaped through subtle forms of recognition and exclusion operating beneath explicit language.

Again: tropisms.

Tiny movements beneath consciousness shaping entire emotional realities.

What strikes me most is that many people experiencing this fragmentation assume something is wrong with them.

They interpret their fluidity as instability.
Their multiplicity as confusion.
Their adaptation as inauthenticity.

But perhaps fragmentation is not always pathology.

Perhaps it is simply what happens when a human life unfolds across multiple worlds.

Perhaps identity was never meant to remain singular under conditions of movement.

Perhaps we are not failing at coherence.

Perhaps we are learning how to integrate complexity.

This feels especially relevant in midlife too.

Because many people eventually reach a point where the identities they performed successfully for years begin to feel emotionally insufficient.

Corporate identities.
Social identities.
Relational identities.
Cultural identities.

At some point, exhaustion forces honesty.

You can no longer maintain every version of yourself for every environment.

And slowly, another kind of work begins: not simply adaptation, but integration.

Learning how to hold multiple selves without abandoning yourself in the process.

Maybe this is why I am less interested these days in the idea of “finding yourself.”

The phrase feels too singular for the complexity of modern identity.

Perhaps the deeper task is learning how to become at home within your own multiplicity.

To stop demanding one definitive self from a life that has unfolded across different languages, losses, ambitions, relationships, and emotional worlds.

To understand that identity can remain fluid without becoming false.

And perhaps the deepest form of belonging is not finally being understood everywhere you go.

Perhaps it is no longer abandoning yourself in order to remain understandable to everyone else.

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Have you ever felt like different versions of yourself exist in different places, languages, or periods of your life?

A new city. A different language. New routines, new people, new rules to learn.

What you didn’t expect was yourself to feel unfamiliar.

Not dramatically. Not in a way you could easily explain to someone else. But quietly, persistently, something shifted. You started noticing small things:

You hesitate before speaking.
You overthink how you come across.
You feel slightly out of place in rooms that should feel normal.

And when someone asks, “How’s the move?” you say, “It’s great,” because technically, it is.

But underneath that answer, there’s something harder to name.

You feel… different.

The change no one prepares you for

Most conversations about moving countries focus on logistics.

Jobs. Housing. Paperwork. Language barriers.

But almost no one talks about identity.

Because identity doesn’t change overnight in a way you can point to. It doesn’t announce itself. It reorganises quietly, in the background, while you’re busy adapting to everything else.

And that’s exactly why it feels so disorienting.

You’re still you.
But not entirely the same version.

You lose your invisible advantages

In your home country, you moved through the world with a kind of ease you didn’t even notice.

You understood social cues without thinking.
You knew how to behave in professional settings.
You could express nuance, humour, confidence—effortlessly.

All of that was invisible competence.

When you move, that layer disappears.

Suddenly, you’re translating your thoughts before you speak. You’re second-guessing tone, timing, even your personality. You become more cautious, more observant.

Not because you’ve changed at your core, but because your environment no longer reflects you back in the same way.

And that creates a subtle but powerful gap between who you know yourself to be and how you’re currently able to show up.

You become hyper-aware of yourself

Back home, your identity felt stable because it was reinforced constantly.

People understood your references.
They responded to you in familiar ways.
You knew where you stood.

In a new country, that feedback loop breaks.

You don’t always get the reactions you expect.
Your humour lands differently.
Your confidence fluctuates depending on the context.

So you start observing yourself more closely.

Am I too direct?
Am I too reserved?
Do I sound competent?

This heightened self-awareness isn’t weakness. It’s adaptation.

But over time, it can make you feel like you’re performing a version of yourself instead of simply being.

You exist between versions of yourself

Here’s the part that’s hardest to articulate:

You’re no longer fully the person you were before.
But you’re not yet fully the person you’re becoming.

You exist in between.

This “in-between” space is where most of the discomfort lives.

It’s not failure. It’s not confusion in the way people assume. It’s a transition that hasn’t fully stabilised yet.

You’re integrating new behaviours, new perspectives, new ways of seeing yourself.

But integration takes time.

And during that time, it can feel like fragmentation.

Why you can’t easily explain it

When something is external, it’s easy to describe.

“I’m struggling with the language.”
“I’m still settling into work.”

But internal shifts are harder.

Because they don’t have clean edges.

You don’t wake up one day and think, “My identity has changed.”

Instead, it shows up in moments:

You hesitate before introducing yourself.
You feel slightly disconnected in conversations.
You realise your old definitions of success or belonging don’t fit as neatly anymore.

Try explaining that casually over coffee.

You can’t. So you don’t.

And that silence makes the experience feel even more isolating.

This isn’t a problem. It’s a process.

It’s tempting to interpret this feeling as something being wrong.

Like you’ve lost confidence.
Or you haven’t “settled in” properly.

But what’s actually happening is much more precise:

Your identity is reorganising.

You’re filtering what still fits from your previous environment.
You’re absorbing new influences from your current one.
And you’re slowly constructing a version of yourself that can hold both.

That process is not linear. And it’s not quick.

But it’s also where depth comes from.

The hidden advantage of feeling “different”

Most people spend their lives in environments that constantly reinforce who they already are.

They don’t have to question it.
They don’t have to rebuild it.

You do.

And while that feels uncomfortable, it also gives you something most people never develop:

The ability to see yourself as something that can evolve.

You start realising that identity isn’t fixed. It’s adaptive. Contextual. Expandable.

You’re not just becoming someone who lives in a different country.

You’re becoming someone who can move between versions of themselves without losing coherence.

What to do with this feeling

Don’t rush to “fix” it.

The instinct is to stabilise quickly—to feel like yourself again as fast as possible.

But that often means forcing yourself back into an old version that no longer fully fits.

Instead:

Notice what’s changing without judging it.
Pay attention to what feels natural versus what feels performative.
Give yourself permission to be in transition without needing to define it immediately.

Clarity doesn’t come from forcing answers.

It comes from allowing the process to unfold long enough that patterns start to make sense.

The truth most people never articulate

You don’t just move countries.

You move identities.

And that movement creates a space between who you were and who you’re becoming.

That space can feel uncomfortable. Disorienting. Hard to explain.

But it’s also where the most important work is happening.

Because you’re not losing yourself.

You’re expanding the definition of who you are.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear your experience.

What’s one moment where you realised you felt different but couldn’t explain why?

For the past few years, I’ve been exploring a question that feels increasingly relevant in our world:

What does it mean to build a life across borders?

Not just geographically, but culturally, professionally, and psychologically.

I call this identity The Modern Migrant.

Not simply someone who moves countries, but someone who builds a life across them.

For me, this idea has been a personal exploration. Through writing, conversations, and the early thinking behind my upcoming book, Becoming a Modern Migrant, I’ve been trying to understand what this experience really means.

Today, that exploration expands into a new format.

The Modern Migrant Podcast is live.

Why a podcast?

Some ideas are best written.

Others are best explored through conversation.

Over the years I’ve met extraordinary people who have built lives across borders, founders, investors, creatives, and operators navigating ambition, identity, and belonging across different cultures.

Again and again I found myself wishing these conversations existed in public.

Because the experience of living internationally is often misunderstood.

From the outside, it looks glamorous.

From the inside, it’s far more complex.

There’s freedom. Reinvention. Opportunity.

But also trade-offs, questions of identity, belonging, and what “home” actually means.

The Modern Migrant podcast is a place to explore those realities through long-form conversations with people building lives between worlds.

Who this is for

This podcast is for people who:

• built a career outside their passport country
• think globally but still search for belonging
• are ambitious but reflective about identity
• believe movement is a mindset, not just a relocation

In other words: modern migrants.

Episode 1 is live

The first episode is now available.

It’s a conversation about the deeper psychology of building a life across countries the invisible shifts that happen when you move through different cultures and systems.

The things we rarely talk about openly.

If you’ve ever lived internationally, you’ll probably recognize parts of your own story in it.

🎙️ Listen to the first episode here: link

A personal note

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know this theme has been quietly shaping much of my thinking.

The podcast is simply the next chapter of the same exploration.

The conversations ahead will go deeper into ambition, identity, migration, and what it means to build a life that doesn’t fit neatly into one place.

If you’re building a life across borders too, I hope you’ll feel at home here.

And if the episode resonates, send it to another modern migrant in your life.

We’re more common than we think.

The Modern Migrant

Blending sociology, philosophy and decolonial thought with lived experience, this opening manifesto explores what happens when reality becomes more complex than the stories available to explain it. Why do some people feel immediately recognisable while others spend years translating themselves? What happens when you are recognised only conditionally, or the language to describe your experience doesn’t yet exist?

At the heart of the series is The Identity Gap™: the space between lived experience and social recognition. The place where what feels deeply personal is often shaped by histories, stories and systems we were never taught to see.

This is the beginning of an ongoing conversation about identity, recognition, belonging and authorship and the language we need to understand them.

Welcome to The Modern Migrant.

The first time you realise you’ve become “a type” in someone else’s eyes, it lands like a small vertigo.

Nothing about you has changed. Your voice is your voice. Your hands are still your hands. Your history is still stitched into your body the same way it always was.

And yet, under the gaze of others, you feel yourself tilt.

The familiar self is rendered strange, as if you’ve stepped into a pane of glass and met a version of you that is slightly misaligned: recognisable, but not quite yours.

That is the uncanny in the glass: not a horror-movie uncanny, but the everyday sociological uncanny, when the social world turns you into an object, a symbol, a category, and you begin to watch yourself being watched.

Freud’s notion of the uncanny, das Unheimliche, was never only about ghosts. It’s about the moment the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when something intimately “known” returns wearing the wrong face.

In the social world, that wrong face can be your own.

You catch yourself behaving the way you think you’re supposed to behave.

You hear your voice slightly altered, carefully neutral, carefully measured, carefully “appropriate.” You feel yourself becoming legible.

The glass isn’t literal. It’s the invisible surface where identity is reflected back to us: a look held half a second too long, a compliment that feels like a diagnosis, a question that pretends to be curiosity but arrives already carrying its answer.

You become aware of yourself as a surface. And once you become a surface, you start living as if you can be read.

This is exactly the kind of social phenomenon Erving Goffman mapped with uncanny precision. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he argues that daily interaction is a kind of performance, not in the sense of being fake, but in the sense of being situated.

We adjust our speech, our tone, our posture based on the room we’re in. Most of the time, it feels natural: a fluid coordination between inner life and social context.

But there are moments when the performance stops feeling like a dance and starts feeling like a trial.

Under a certain kind of gaze, you begin to experience your own self as something slightly external. You become aware of your “front stage” not as expression, but as defense.

Your sentences become overly edited. Your laughter feels timed. Your body becomes an ambassador. Goffman’s insight is that social life depends on these performances, but the unsettling part is how quickly performance can curdle into self-estrangement when the audience holds disproportionate power over the meaning of who you are.

You can feel it in small moments. When your accent is treated like a charming accessory until it becomes a competence question. When you are praised for being “so well-spoken,” as though eloquence is surprising in your body. When you are asked, “Where are you really from?” and you realize the question isn’t geographic, it’s ontological. It’s asking: what are you, exactly, and which box should I place you in so my world stays orderly?

This is where W.E.B. Du Bois becomes a compass rather than a citation. Du Bois’ “double consciousness” describes the split that occurs when you must constantly see yourself through the eyes of others, when you are forced into a second-person relationship with your own life. You become both subject and spectator. You live your life, and simultaneously monitor your life.

Du Bois wrote this in the context of race and the American color line, but the mechanism travels across many forms of “markedness”: migration, class, gender, religion, language. Whenever the social world treats you as representative, of a group, a stereotype, a story it already understands, you develop an internalized watcher. Not because you’re vain, but because the stakes are real. Being misread can cost you safety, opportunity, belonging.

And so you learn a particular kind of vigilance: not only Who am I? but How am I being understood right now?

The uncanny part is that the gaze doesn’t just observe you, it changes the texture of your selfhood.

You begin to anticipate misunderstanding before it happens.

You pre-empt the assumptions.

You translate yourself into something easier to digest, and then feel the grief of that translation: I was here, but not entirely.

When the self becomes strange, it’s not because you’ve lost yourself.

It’s because you are being forced to carry a social meaning heavier than your actual life. The gaze compresses complexity. It turns contradictions into “confusion,” nuance into “inconsistency,” multiplicity into “not fitting in.” The gaze prefers categories; the human self is rarely categorical.

This is why the uncanny is exhausting. It’s a cognitive and emotional tax. You are not only living; you are managing legibility. Goffman might call it impression management. Which version of me will be safe here? Which version of me will be believed? Which version of me will be rewarded?

And yet, here’s the twist, the uncanny can become a doorway.

Because once you recognize the glass, you can start asking: whose gaze is this? What does it demand? What does it punish? What does it reward? The moment you identify the gaze as a social force, not a personal truth, you regain a kind of authorship.

Freud helps us name the sensation: the unsettling return of the familiar in distorted form. Goffman helps us see the mechanism: the performance demanded by the room. Du Bois helps us understand the cost: the split vision of the self under a world that insists on reading you before it meets you.

Together they point to a single conclusion: the glass is not the truth. It is a surface shaped by the anxieties of the social order, its need for coherence, hierarchy, and easy narratives. And you do not owe that surface your whole self.

So the next time you feel that vertigo, when you sense yourself being rendered into a type, pause and name what is happening. Not as insecurity, but as social process. The gaze is doing what gazes do: simplifying, sorting, assigning. But you can refuse to make its interpretation your home.

You are allowed to step away from the glass.

You are allowed to remain familiar to yourself, even when you are made strange by others.

If this landed for you, subscribe, this Substack is where I’m mapping identity, power, and belonging in real time.

And if you prefer to listen: my podcast is launching soon.

Subscribe here so you don’t miss the first episode.

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For most of history, migration was a rupture.

You left. You arrived. You assimilated or you didn’t.

But the Modern Migrant lives in a different reality entirely. One defined not by departure and arrival, but by simultaneity. We exist in multiple cultural, economic, and psychological spaces at once. Home is no longer a geography. It’s a network.

Sociologist Arjun Appadurai described this shift decades ago when he introduced the idea of global cultural flows, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes overlapping systems that reshape identity beyond borders (Appadurai, 1996). Today, that theory is not abstract. It is lived experience.

You wake up in London.
Your family WhatsApp group is active in your origin country.
Your cultural references are American.
Your emotional memories belong somewhere else entirely.

The Modern Migrant does not move between worlds. We layer them.

This layered identity often creates a quiet psychological tension. Traditional migration narratives assume linear belonging, you trade one identity for another. But contemporary research suggests something else: hybrid identity formation.

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha called this the Third Space, a liminal zone where new identities are created through cultural negotiation rather than replacement (Bhabha, 1994). The Modern Migrant lives permanently in that Third Space.

And that can be both power and pain.

Power, because cognitive flexibility increases. Studies show multicultural exposure correlates with higher creativity, complex problem-solving, and entrepreneurial behavior (Leung et al., 2008). Many migrants develop what psychologists call cultural frame switching, the ability to adapt behaviors and perspectives across contexts.

Pain, because belonging becomes ambiguous. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity is useful here: identities are no longer fixed; they are fluid, negotiated, and sometimes unstable (Bauman, 2000). For migrants, this liquidity intensifies. You are always slightly foreign everywhere, including in the place you started.

There is also a structural dimension. Migration today is not only about survival; it is increasingly about optimization. Talent mobility, global education, remote work, and capital flows have created what sociologist Steven Vertovec calls super-diversity, highly complex migration patterns that cannot be explained by nationality alone (Vertovec, 2007).

The Modern Migrant may move not because they must, but because they can.

Opportunity becomes geography-agnostic.

This creates a new psychological archetype: the strategic nomad. Someone who treats location as a variable rather than destiny.

But here is the paradox.

Even as borders become more permeable economically, identity questions become more intense personally. The more options you have, the more you must decide who you are.

Where do I belong?
Who am I becoming?
What do I keep?
What do I let go?

These questions sit at the heart of the Modern Migrant experience.

Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells argued that we now live in a network society, where power and meaning are organized through global connections rather than physical proximity (Castells, 1996). Migrants are not peripheral to this system, we are prototypes of it.

We are early adopters of the future human condition.

Multiple affiliations.
Portable identity.
Nonlinear belonging.

The Modern Migrant is not a person between worlds.

We are people building new ones.

And perhaps the most important realization is this:

Migration is no longer only a demographic phenomenon.

It is an identity revolution.

If you’re navigating life across cultures, try noticing where you feel most “yourself”, not where you think you should belong. Identity clarity often comes from paying attention to energy, not expectations.

What challenges have you faced in balancing multiple identities or places you call home? I’d love to hear your experience.

So here’s my question for you:
When you think about “home” today, is it a place or a version of yourself?

References

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture.
Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society.
Leung, A. K.-y., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C.-y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity. American Psychologist.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies.

There is a particular kind of life that does not belong entirely to one place.

It moves across countries, languages, and social worlds. It accumulates versions of self. It learns to adapt, to perform, to translate. From the outside, it can look like opportunity. From the inside, it’s often more complex: ambition mixed with dislocation, reinvention mixed with loss, belonging that is conditional rather than assumed.

This space is for that experience.

I write about migration not only as geography, but as identity, what happens when you build a life beyond where you started. The negotiations between who you were, who you are expected to be, and who you are trying to become. The invisible labour of starting over. The tension between gratitude and recognition. The quiet moment when you realise you are being tolerated, not truly seen.

Some essays are personal. Some are analytical.

Most live somewhere in between.

Underlying all of them is one question: how do you construct a coherent self when your life has been shaped by multiple cultures, systems, and expectations?

If you have ever felt stretched between places, roles, or versions of yourself, you are in the right place.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear where you’re reading from.

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