Simple question? Long answer...

“Where are you from?”

36 years in and this seemingly innocuous question still does a number on me. It comes in many guises. The coworker on the train home, the London cabbie trying to size up my football allegiance before declaring his, or the default icebreaker at the party. For most, it’s batted back effortlessly with answers well rehearsed over years of practice. For me, not so much.

“It’s complicated”. “How long have you got?”. “I’m kind of from all over” is the typical holding pattern before the inevitable unravelling begins...

So let’s start with a couple of things you need to know about me at this point. I was born in the US, my dad is British, mi madre es Española, j'ai été élevé en Belgique. What one might call a pretty textbook “third culture kid”.

Brussels is a funny place to grow up. The “heart of Europe”. A bubble where cultural difference isn’t just accepted but actively celebrated at every turn. On the school bus I’d jump from one language to another as I traded the latest Panini collection with Latvian sticker kingpins whilst trying to coax something out of the older Spanish girls that I could  cash in for social capital once I got to class. A cursory listen to one of my mini-disks at the time would have dropped you into a world of 90’s US hip-hop, Belgian house music, UK garage and some random Spanish guitar renditions I’d copied over from my cousin's hard drive on my last visit to Spain. Passions, not passports, shaped my sense of belonging to all those worlds.

“Tu viens d'où alors?" 

Depending who was asking and the estimated length of the interaction, I’d go with a longer or shorter version but often dial up all the parts that felt the most different from my context at that very moment. In the Brussels skateparks, I was “half English, half Spanish”. When I got to my university in the UK, I was “from Brussels. It’s in Belgium. Yeah it’s a country.” In the late night Uber in NYC, I leaned into whatever combination of all the above helped me best weigh in on local food spots, key soccer matchups that weekend or the latest political development halfway across the planet. 

You get it. There’s layers. It’s complicated. But all that considered, when it really comes down to it, where AM I from?  

Well, what's really in that question anyway? What is it that I’m really being asked? “Where did you grow up? Who are your parents? Where’s “home”? What do you believe?... Who are you?” 

So much tied up in one short question. So little to offer up in response when you have one foot in different worlds. Code switching doesn’t just become a necessary tool to navigate these but a way of building connection and relating in some shape or form to almost everyone I meet. It’s what makes me, me. A way to build on an identity that is moveable and not anchored to one place.

I’m very grateful for the experiences I’ve had and how they’ve pushed me to look outwards when a lot of the world is doing the opposite, but there are two sides to every coin. With the ability to relate to nearly everyone, comes the fact that my own narrative suffers a relatability problem. My story is often too reliant on disparate fragments of memory that only others who’ve been on a similar journey could understand how to piece together. The importance of the precious few who’ve been along for the ride putting together the same puzzle pieces gets bigger with every year that passes.

“Pero a ver. No lo entiendo. ¿De donde eres?” 

Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Call Me By Your Name” who’s lead character Elio spends a dreamy Italian summer trying to wrestle with a his own identity questions, captures this perfectly:

“When you grow up this way, there is a feeling of being lost, but to be lost is also to be open. It reminds us of our empathy, and of what we share if we were only to try and find it”

In many ways, I’ll never be English or Spanish or Belgian or American and that’s ok. It’s more than ok. Being caught in between has stretched me. My values and the loyalties to the people closest to me on this journey are the passport stamps I cherish the most. That collection of handpicked pieces that make up my identity are not mutually exclusive but all dependent on one another to get to something that's bigger than the sum of the parts. I don’t belong to any one place but choose to belong to many. The concrete covered 5-a-side pitches of Brussels where I developed a lifelong passion for the beautiful game, the drum and bass raves under London arches where I found my people or the brownstone laden leafy streets of Bed-Stuy where we built a house and started a family. That’s where I’m from.

I now have three young children. All born in NYC, living in London with a Belgian mother and happily lost father.

So where are they all from? 

I can’t wait to find out.