When I was three years old, my family folded Brazil in our luggage and moved to the United States. Every year since, we’ve unfolded it again — sometimes for two weeks, sometimes for several months — before packing it back up and returning. This is the rhythm of how I was raised: two countries, one life, and the permanent sensation of being slightly out of place in both. 

I’ve lately come to think of it less as a disadvantage and more as an education. Not the kind with syllabi and grades, but the kind that teaches you to read a room you don’t fully belong to, to translate not just words but silences, and to hold two contradictory versions of yourself simultaneously without dropping either. It is exhausting, but rewarding. 

There’s a name for people raised this way. Sociologists call us third culture kids: those who grew up moving between worlds, absorbing enough of each to feel native in neither. David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken, who pioneered the research, describe third culture kids as people who “build relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any.” 

“No full ownership.” I have turned that phrase over in my mind more times than I can count. It is the most precise description I’ve encountered for something I spent years assuming was just a personal failure of belonging. You don’t need a plane ticket to recognize this feeling. Any student who has stepped between two sets of expectations — between the culture their family carries and the one their campus assumes — knows some version of this vertigo.

In Brazil, I was always a little too American: too direct, too efficient, too willing to skip the part of the conversation where you just sit together and let time pass. In the United States, I was a little too Brazilian: too warm, too unhurried, too prone to lingering. In both places I was fluent, and in both places I still felt foreign. You learn, eventually, to perform fluency. You become very good at it and then spend a long time wondering which performance, if either, is actually you. 

There is, however, a silver lining. Third culture kids tend to be more socially tuned in than their monoculturally-raised peers. They also tend to be more open-minded, culturally accepting, and flexible, with a stronger pull toward language, travel, and relationships that cross cultural lines. 

Researchers have noted these positive patterns alongside their challenges, but the data can only go so far in capturing how they feel in practice.

There is grief in this life that doesn’t get talked about enough; the Portuguese words that feel clumsy in your mouth after months away, the cultural references that land like static at family dinner, the exhaustion of being someone’s introduction to a place they’ve never thought much about. You are forever translating, and the translation is never perfect. Something always gets lost and you learn to mourn it quietly, on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic. 

What I didn’t expect is what grows in that space. A tolerance for ambiguity that becomes, in time, something close to comfort. An instinct for finding common ground with people whose backgrounds look nothing like yours, because you’ve never had the luxury of assuming another background like yours exists. A capacity to hold two truths at once — this is home, and so is that, and though neither is quite enough, both are more than sufficient — without needing to resolve the tension into something neater. 

I still pack for Brazil with a certain deliberateness. I still feel the shift when the plane descends, reaching for a version of myself I’ve kept somewhere in storage. What’s different now is that I’ve stopped waiting to arrive somewhere that feels singular and permanent, and started paying attention to who I am in the in-between. 

It turns out that’s where most of the interesting people are anyway. Not the ones with clean, unbroken stories about where they’re from, but the ones who’ve had to construct their sense of self from more than one set of materials. 

You don’t have to have grown up between two countries to know this feeling. You just have to have stood, at some point, between two versions of yourself, wondering which one to lead with, and whether the other one would survive the wait. 

Most of us, by the time we reach college, have stood exactly there.