On living between worlds

I was born in Delhi, grew up in Dubai, and have spent my adult life in the UK. I have never lived in a place that was fully mine.

This experience — of belonging partially everywhere and completely nowhere — is one of the most common things I hear in my work. It arrives under many names: the migrant experience, the third-culture childhood, the code-switching professional, the queer person who learned to edit themselves for every room, the person from a racialised community navigating predominantly White/ normative-dominant systems and spaces, the ADHD and neurodivergent person who learned to mask as if it was their superpower.

What I have come to understand, both personally and professionally, is that living between worlds is not only a source of pain. It is also a form of intelligence. The capacity to hold multiple perspectives, to translate, to read a room — these are real skills, built under pressure. I fully embrace belonging everywhere and nowhere and value being a global citizen, intentionally, in all its multidimensionality, uniqueness and diversity. An incomparable strength.

The task is not to collapse the multiplicity into something simpler or binary, to its comfortable palatable part. It is to find the thread of you that runs through all of it. To build a home inside yourself that doesn't depend on the approval of any one world. To keep evolving and unfolding, re-growing, transforming.

That is slow work. It is relational work. It cannot be rushed. But it is possible.