People love to romanticise the international childhood.
They see passports filled with stamps, photographs from different continents, stories about moving countries, learning languages, and experiencing cultures most people only encounter on holiday. They call it a gift. They call us global citizens. Lucky. Adaptable. Worldly.
What they rarely talk about is the grief.
Because what happens when you spend your entire life learning how to belong everywhere, but never fully belong anywhere?
I was born in Angola, raised between Namibia, the United States, and Norway. Depending on who asks, I can be African, Angolan, Namibian, Norwegian, American-influenced, or simply “international.”
The truth is that I have been all of those things and none of them at the same time.
For most of my life, I believed my greatest strength was adaptability. I could walk into almost any room and figure out how to fit. New country? New school? New culture? Give me a few weeks and I would find my place.
Or at least, that is what it looked like from the outside.
What nobody saw was that every adaptation required a small negotiation with myself. Every move demanded that I leave something behind. A version of me. A way of speaking. A way of dressing. A piece of my identity that no longer made sense in the next country.
By my mid-twenties, I began to wonder something that felt almost dangerous to ask:
If I can become whoever a place needs me to be, who am I when the place is gone?
That question sits at the heart of the Third Culture Kid experience, but I think it is especially complicated for African children who grow up crossing borders.
Because unlike many Western expatriates, we are often expected to prove our belonging everywhere.
Too African in some spaces.
Not African enough in others.
Too foreign here.
Too local there.
Too Black.
Too international.
Too much. Not enough.
All at once.
The uncomfortable truth is that global mobility is often celebrated as freedom, but for many of us it comes with an invisible tax: the slow erosion of certainty about who we are. It is a cost that can take decades to fully understand.
My father noticed it before I did. He called me a chameleon, someone who could adapt to any environment, blend into any culture, and become whatever a place seemed to require. For years, I thought the goal was to figure out where I belonged.
Angola. Namibia. America. Norway. I searched for an answer in geography, believing that if I could just identify the one place that truly claimed me, everything else would fall into place. What I eventually discovered, however, is that belonging is not a country. It is not a passport, an accent, or a language. Belonging is the moment you stop asking permission to exist exactly as you are.
Beyond Angola was born from that realization, not because I have found all the answers, but because I have stopped looking for them in other people’s definitions of who I should be.
Today, I carry Angola with me. I carry Namibia. I carry America. I carry Norway. I am not divided between them; I am made from them. The places that once felt like competing versions of my identity have become threads in the same story. And for the first time in my life, I no longer feel caught between worlds.
I have found peace in the in-between, and that finally feels like home.
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