This is a placeholder post. It’s a slightly edited version of an AI generated essay. The essay was the response to a very specific prompt provided by me.
Sometimes I wonder whether some people ever truly arrive anywhere. In my early twenties I used to think that life was supposed to move in stages: you leave one place, settle in another, find your people, your profession, your opinions, and eventually become someone who belongs. Instead, I have spent much of my young life somewhere in between. It is not an unhappy place, but it is a strange one. After enough years, you stop thinking of the threshold as something you are crossing and begin to accept that it is where you live.
Growing up in Eastern Europe already meant learning that belonging was never as simple as the maps suggested. My country had a majority, and I was not quite part of it. For many nationality and citizenship are interchangeable. Not for me. Later I moved west, where I became (or better: remained) simply another foreigner. I (try) to learn new languages, new customs, new ways of speaking and behaving. People often assume that speaking several languages means feeling at home in several cultures. In reality, it often means carrying different versions of yourself, each one slightly incomplete. Every language gives you something, but none of them tells the whole story.
Education complicated things further. My parents worked hard with their hands, and I became the first in the family to continue studying beyond what anyone had imagined possible. That achievement is supposed to move a person into another social world, but life rarely works with such clean transitions. I never wanted the life my parents had, not because I looked down on it, but because I knew how physically demanding, and intellectually restrictive it could be. On the other hand, after a while I couldn’t align myself with people who seemed to treat education as a badge of identity or who built their lives around the quiet competitions of the middle classes. I have a postgraduate diploma, but I have never thought of myself as a “pure” intellectual. It has always felt like something I did rather than someone I became.
The same feeling followed me into social life. When I was younger, I went to parties because that seemed to be what everyone did. People drank until they forgot the evening (I did it a few times as well), exchanged jokes that were funny mostly because they came at someone else’s expense, and insulted each other in the affectionate way that many groups call friendship. I laughed when it seemed appropriate, stayed until it seemed polite to leave, and went home with the unmistakable feeling that I had witnessed something rather than participated in it. Maybe there was nothing wrong with those people. I simply never understood why this was supposed to be the peak of social life.
Politics has never offered much comfort either. In Western Europe, as in much of the world, people often begin by asking whether you are left or right, as though that single answer reveals the architecture of your mind. I have never found the question particularly interesting. Most real problems refuse to fit neatly into those categories, and most real people are too contradictory to live inside them consistently. The older I become, the more I suspect that ideological labels often serve the same purpose as football shirts: they tell everyone which side you are on before the conversation has even begun.
Living between cultures has, however, taught me something valuable. Once you have seen the same custom regarded as perfectly normal in one country and completely absurd in another, you become suspicious of certainty. You notice how many beliefs are inherited rather than examined, how many traditions survive simply because nobody remembers asking why they exist. Moving from East to West did not replace one worldview with another. It simply multiplied the number of perspectives from which I could observe the same reality. That habit of navigating, not only between languages, but assumptions, has probably shaped me more than any degree ever could.
There is a price for living like this. Belonging never arrives in the uncomplicated form you imagine when you are young. You build friendships, establish routines, contribute to the place where you live, yet some part of you always remains aware that you are looking at the room from a slightly different angle. You become accustomed to explaining references that others take for granted and to understanding jokes that you would never have invented yourself. Home gradually becomes less of a place on the map than a collection of memories, habits, and people scattered across countries.
I no longer expect that feeling to disappear. Perhaps some lives are simply meant to unfold in the space between worlds. There are worse places to live. From the threshold you can see more than those who never leave the room they were born into, even if you sometimes envy the ease with which they belong. I have come to think that a meaningful life is not always about finding the perfect place to stand. Sometimes it is about learning to make peace with the fact that your home is the border itself.