Growing Up Between Two Cultures Gave Me No Place to Land

My parents had moved from Algiers to Lyon before I was born and I grew up in that specific in-between that the children of immigrants know well - the household with its own language, its own food, its own rhythms, and then the school and the street and the wider French world with entirely different ones, and the daily task of moving between the two without losing either.

I was good at this translation work in the practical sense by the time I was a teenager. What I was not good at, and did not realise for years, was the internal version of it - having a coherent sense of who I was that was not dependent on which context I was in.

In French settings I was more careful, more contained, quietly aware of navigating a space that did not fully belong to me. In Algerian family settings I was warmer, louder, more immediately at ease but also aware of the ways I had grown up different from cousins who had stayed, of the gaps that French schooling and French friends had created in my relationship to a culture that was supposed to be mine by inheritance.

I was shifting shape in both directions and belonged completely to neither, which produced a loneliness that was hard to describe because it was structural rather than situational.

At 27, after years of managing this by being very good at adapting rather than having a fixed self to bring to any situation, I started writing - a journal, initially, then longer essays that I shared with no one.

The writing forced me to stay with a thought long enough to finish it, which is different from the constant code-switching of daily life where every thought is interrupted by the need to recalibrate for the current context.

In those pages I found, slowly, a version of myself that was not French or Algerian but was genuinely made from both - a person who understood irony and formality from one inheritance and warmth and directness from another, who had been shaped by two sets of values that were not always compatible and who was therefore more comfortable with contradiction than most people.

What had felt like displacement was also a kind of freedom. I had not been given a fixed identity. I had been given the raw material to build one. That building took most of my twenties and I am still doing it.

But I stopped waiting to land somewhere and started treating the in-between as the place I actually lived.