You're Not From Here. You're Not From There. You're From Both.
The third-culture experience of growing up African or Caribbean in America, the UK, or Canada — and why "where are you really from?" is the wrong question.
You know exactly what you do with your accent.
In certain rooms, it drifts toward British. In others, you let the Caribbean roll back in. On the phone with your mother, it becomes something else entirely — the version of yourself that only exists in that language, between those two people. You are not performing. You are code-switching in the truest sense: different modes for different worlds, all of them real, none of them the whole picture.
This is the third-culture experience. And if you grew up African or Caribbean in America, the UK, or Canada, you know it intimately.
Remember the lunchbox. Maybe you carried jollof rice in a container that your mother packed with love and efficiency. Maybe it was curry goat. Plantain in a small bag. Egusi soup that was still warm at noon. And you remember the moment someone leaned over and said — not cruelly, just with the casual certainty of a child who has never considered that food could be anything other than what they know — "what is *that* smell?"
That was the first time you understood that your home existed on a different frequency than the world around you.
You spent years learning to navigate it. You learned which parts of yourself to bring into which rooms. You became fluent in the mainstream culture — its references, its humor, its unspoken rules — while also holding onto the other fluency, the one from your parents' world. The dual fluency is a superpower. It is also exhausting.
And then you go back. To Lagos or Kingston or Accra or Port-of-Spain or wherever home is supposed to be. And they look at you sideways. "You're not really Nigerian, you know." "You sound British." "You don't know how things work here." You have spent your whole life being too African for the West and now you are too Western for Africa. The belonging you thought was waiting for you at the source — it has conditions you didn't know about.
This is the specific grief of the diaspora. Not the grief of loss, exactly, but the grief of in-between. The feeling that the place you most belong might not exist on any map.
Watch your parents. Watch what happens as the years pass. The accent softens slightly. The dishes are made less often, or made differently because certain ingredients are hard to find. The music plays less loudly. The language — if you were lucky enough to be raised in it — becomes something they speak between themselves rather than to you. And you realize: culture is not automatically inherited. It has to be chosen. It has to be fought for.
The choice to reclaim it is the most important thing.
Not because you have something to prove to the people back home. Not to perform authenticity for anyone who has ever questioned your identity. But because that culture is yours — earned through the specific experience of carrying it across an ocean, adapting it, keeping it alive in conditions it was never designed for. You didn't inherit a frozen museum piece. You inherited something living, and you kept it alive. That is not less authentic. That is the whole story.
Here is what we know at Resilience House: you do not have to choose.
You are not the watered-down version of your parents' culture. You are not the confused outsider in the country where you were born. You are something new — a person formed by two worlds, carrying both, beholden to neither in the way that either side might demand.
The question "where are you really from?" is the wrong question. The right question is: who are you? And the answer, for the diaspora, is always: I am from here. I am from there. I am from the space between, and I have made it home.
Resilience House is built for exactly this. Come as you are — all of you, both of you, every version of you.