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As an Expat, I Have Several Identities
Changing the place you call home can give you profound insight into human nature.
Expats. Immigrants. Travellers.
The people who live in between two worlds: the one they know and the one they don’t. After a while, it becomes hard to tell which one’s which.
Moving countries is an experience that gives you no choice but to become a new person. Everything that shaped you in your native country is suddenly gone — and replaced by something different. From the food on the supermarket shelves to the filler phrases people use to keep conversations going, it’s all foreign. Incomprehensible, at first.
This demands you to adjust — and, in the process, discover your new incarnation which only exists in a place where your childhood friendships never occurred.
The experience of moving to a country that doesn’t understand you — and which you don’t understand either — is a journey. To me, it’s been a profound one. Whenever I sober up and realize how it changed me, I almost can’t believe what I see.
We know that the language and culture we grow up with shapes who we become. We understand it on the logical level. But it’s a different thing to grasp it intellectually than it is to experience it first-hand.
