Between Cultures: A Welcome Letter

There is a strange moment that happens when you have lived in more than one world for too long.

You are standing in a kitchen, or on a train, or scrolling your phone in a language that did not raise you. You are answering messages from people in three time zones. You are cooking one culture’s comfort food while your mind is somewhere else entirely. Someone calls you “so international” like it is a compliment, and you smile, because it is easier than explaining that you have not felt fully “from” anywhere in years.

That is what between cultures feels like. Not just the airport version, the emotional one.

For many of us in The Otherhood, it is also racial. Ethnic. Generational. Diaspora.

You carry your grandmother’s accent in your ear, your parents’ migration story in your bones, and a passport that does not match how people see you. Your skin reads one thing, your surname another, your life another entirely. You are the Black girl in a white village, the Brown woman in a European boardroom, the mixed kid grown up and still explaining why you “sound American” or “do not look Latina enough.”

This is where The Otherhood lives.

It is for the woman of color who left home and built a new one. For the mixed and multicultural woman who has never belonged to just one box. For the daughter of immigrants, the third culture kid who grew up and realized there is no “back home” that fully fits anymore. For the woman raising children who will have a different passport, a different mother tongue, a different relationship to race than she did.

You know exactly who you are. And you also have no idea who you are anymore. Both are true.

Welcome. You are in the right place.

Not expat, not tourist, not a tidy “reinvention”

There are plenty of glossy stories about moving abroad and starting over.

Quit my job, moved to a charming city, found myself, started a business. Here is my rooftop. Here is my market basket. Here is my upgraded personality.

Nice for them. Also incomplete.

What we do not see in those stories are the years of paperwork, the visas that get denied, the racism and colorism that travel with you, the way your body braces when you are the only Brown or Black woman in yet another room. We do not see the friendships that fade because people cannot hold the version of you that left. We do not see the self doubt that comes with being sharp and capable in one world and suddenly average or invisible in another, especially when your ethnicity already put you on the back foot.

And some of us never moved at all. Our “abroad” was internal. We crossed from silence to truth. From one religion to another. From being the daughter who swallowed everything to the woman who names it. From playing the “good immigrant child” to refusing to carry everyone’s survival story on our back.

Between cultures is not just a location story. It is a story of race, loyalty, money, language, aging, faith, and belonging. It is the feeling of carrying several versions of yourself inside one body and trying to give each of them a home, while the world keeps insisting you choose one.

You may not call yourself an expat. Maybe that word does not fit your race, your passport, your bank account, or the way your family crossed borders. Maybe your migration was survival, not aesthetics. Maybe the only border you crossed was emotional. You woke up and realized you cannot go back to the woman who tolerated what you used to tolerate.

That counts. You belong here too.

The quiet cost of being “the brave one”

In a lot of families and friend circles, there is one person who went first.

The one who left. The one who moved countries. The one who divorced. The one who came out. The one who chose not to repeat the same abusive pattern. The one who changed careers at 42 even though everyone said she should be grateful and stay put.

From the outside, you are the brave one. The strong one. The one people send messages to when they are tired of their own lives and want to live through yours for a moment.

On the inside, it feels different.

You are the one who does not have a template to follow. The one holding the pressure of “making it” so the sacrifice of migration or reinvention means something. The one who translates at the doctor’s office and also translates your life for relatives who think you have become too Western, too modern, too different.

You can love them and still feel unseen.

Being the brave one is expensive. It costs money, stability, and sometimes the illusion that you belong unconditionally anywhere. It can cost you the version of home that once held you, even when it never fully understood you, your race, your ambition, or your need for air.

Between cultures is where we tell the truth about that cost, without turning it into a performance.

What we talk about here

This journal exists because real life is messier than a clean before and after, and more layered than a cute quote tile.

We talk about:

• Identity, race, and inner borders
  Who you are when your old labels do not fit anymore. The grief of outgrowing earlier versions of yourself. The way race, ethnicity, and culture shape how you are read before you even speak. The quiet relief of finally claiming all of it.

• Home, love, and family across distance
  Raising kids who will not have your accent. Navigating aging parents from another country. Loving people who do not share your culture or your history and trying to keep your roots alive anyway. Holding both duty and self respect in the same heart.

• Work, money, and late-stage reinvention
  Starting again at 38, 44, 51 while the world still pays you less than you are worth. CVs that do not translate. Recruiters who love your “diverse background” but not enough to pay for it. The gap between how capable you are and how the market chooses to see you.

• Body, aging, and visibility
  What it feels like when your face, skin, hair, accent, or age mark you as “other” in every room. The comments about your body, your food, your hair. The stories your body carries from each place and each history. How aging hits different when you are still building safety.

• Belonging, faith, and the stories we inherit
  The communities we leave, the micro communities we build, the religious and cultural maps that raised us, and what we keep, rewrite, or burn. The myths about being the “strong one,” the “good immigrant,” the “grateful daughter,” and what happens when we put those myths down.

We are not here to romanticize struggle or sell you a reinvention formula. We are here to hold the full picture of what it takes to live a life that does not fit into one neat nationality, ethnicity, role, or storyline.

Why stories, and why now

Women 35 to 55 are often treated like background characters in their own lives.

Too young to quit. Too old to start over. Too responsible for risk and too “mature” for collapse. Add being Black, Brown, mixed, immigrant, or visibly “other,” and the pressure multiplies. By this stage, everyone assumes you know where you belong and what you are doing.

Many of us do not.
Or we do, and we are still building the bridge to get there.

Stories are how we make sense of that in-between. When one woman says, “I thought I was the only one who felt this,” and another one says, “no, that is me too,” something loosens. Shame drops. Clarity rises. The weight of your choices feels a little less like exile and a little more like devotion to the life you were always meant to live.

We tell these stories so you can see yourself more clearly, not less.

We also tell them so that the next woman who changes countries, confronts abuse, leaves a relationship, refuses a role that does not fit, or quietly admits that her old life is too small does not feel as alone as you did.

How to read this journal

Read it like you would talk to a close friend at a late kitchen table:

Slowly, when you have the energy.
Honestly, without needing to agree with every word.
Gently, knowing that behind each piece there is a real person who has paid for that insight with actual life.

Some stories will feel like home. Others will push you. Some may feel too raw because you are still in the middle of your own version. That is allowed. You decide what you are ready for.

You might see yourself in the woman who left and never went back. In the woman who returned home and felt like a guest. In the woman who never crossed a border physically but burned an old life to protect her own spirit and her future line.

Whichever one you are, you are not strange. You are not late. You are not broken for needing more than one belonging, more than one story, more than one home.

You are simply living between cultures.

An invitation

If you are reading this with a small knot in your chest because something here is too familiar, consider this your invitation.

To tell your story. To witness other women’s stories. To let yourself be as layered, ethnic, mixed, complicated, and brilliant as you actually are, without shrinking to make anyone else comfortable.

This is The Otherhood. We live in the in-between, where identity is chosen and evolving, home is plural, and belonging is something we build together, on purpose.

You have not missed your chance. You are right on time.

Welcome to Between Cultures.