There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living between cultures. You switch languages mid-sentence, mid-thought, sometimes mid-feeling. You are one person at your family's table and another at work. You field questions about where you're "really" from in one country, and get told you've changed, become foreign, in the other. And somewhere underneath all the switching, a quieter question hums: which of these people is actually me?
I know this terrain personally as well as professionally — I live and work between English and Italian, and some feelings still arrive in one language and refuse to translate into the other. So let me say the most important thing first: if you live between worlds and sometimes feel unsettled by it, there is nothing wrong with you. You are having an understandable response to a genuinely demanding situation — one that more and more people share, and that very few were ever prepared for.
The myth of the single self
Much of the pain here comes from an assumption so deep we rarely notice it: that a healthy person has one consistent self, and that being different in different contexts means being fake in at least one of them. But this assumption is itself cultural — a particular, modern, Western idea of what a person is. Anthropology, my first discipline, is full of societies where the self is understood differently: as something woven from relationships, roles, and obligations rather than a sealed unit carried identically everywhere.
Seen from that wider view, your flexibility is not fragmentation. Having more than one way of being isn't evidence of a missing "real you" — it can be a genuine richness. The trouble usually isn't that you contain multitudes; it's that you've been handed a story which says you shouldn't.
The real losses are real
That said, I don't want to tidy this up too quickly, because living between worlds involves genuine losses that deserve to be grieved rather than reframed away. There can be grief for the person you might have been if you'd stayed, or if your parents had. Guilt about drifting from your family's values — or resentment at being asked to carry them. The loneliness of never being fully legible: always translating yourself, never quite off duty. And sometimes an ache with no clear name, a homesickness for a home that may never have existed as you remember it.
These are not signs of failure to adapt. They are the honest costs of a complicated inheritance, and they tend to loosen when they're finally spoken about with someone who doesn't need the context explained from scratch.
What therapy can offer
Therapy can't hand you a resolved identity — no one can, and I'd be wary of anyone who promised to. What it can offer is a place where all of your worlds are allowed in the room at once. Where you don't have to be your family's version of you, or your adopted country's version, but can look at both with curiosity and decide, piece by piece, what you actually want to carry forward. Which values are truly yours? Which were only ever borrowed? What do you owe, and to whom — and what, after honest reflection, do you choose?
Those questions don't belong to any one culture, which is exactly why they can hold a life lived across several. The aim isn't to pick a side. It's to become the author of the combination — someone who stands between worlds not as a person torn, but as a person choosing.
If you'd like the deeper, more scholarly version of these ideas — how anthropology and existential therapy together make sense of identity across cultures — I've written a longer companion piece: The self between cultures.
And if any of this feels like your life, you're welcome to get in touch. I offer therapy in English and Italian, and the first conversation is free — in whichever language feels most like you that day.
— Irene
This post is intended for general information and reflection. It is not a substitute for professional mental health assessment or treatment. If you are experiencing significant distress, please speak with a qualified counsellor, therapist, or your GP.
