What expatriation really does to your identity.
On layers, cracks, and the thread that holds you together.
Welcome to The Inclusion Room — where literature, science, and storytelling meet to explore belonging, intercultural identity, and the experience of building a life between cultures.
There is an insidious transformation that happens when you settle somewhere else. Your identity layers itself. It cracks. It absorbs what it shouldn’t. And sometimes, you lose the thread without even realising it.
So would you be able to say right now, who are you? Do you still have the thread?
I’ve been thinking about how my identity has layered itself over time, about the mechanisms I recognise around me — in my clients, in my community, in my friends. And I’ve done research to understand which phenomena happen most frequently.
The first shock: competence that doesn’t translate
I arrived in my first expatriation as a student. A scientist. Good results. Someone who caught on quickly. Someone — I realise this now — who was used to being in control.
And then I arrived in France and had to confront my studies in this new language.
What I discovered was this: I understood the physical mechanisms. I knew how to solve the problems. But I didn’t have the words to do it in that language. And re-reading an exercise took me longer than solving it.
That was the first crack in my identity.
Everything I had built on competence, on speed, on control — it was still there. But for the first time, it wasn’t enough. And in its place, something unexpected appeared: humility. That capacity to no longer know, and to keep going anyway.
That first identity shift happened there: between control and humility.
The language that changes who you are
Research on multilingual speakers — notably Dewaele & Nakano (2013) — shows that many report feeling like a different person depending on which language they speak. Koven (2001, 2007), cited in this research, demonstrated that learning to operate in a second language has the ability to affect the individual’s behaviour itself — not just the way they communicate, but the way they are.
Since those early years, my command of that first language has evolved. And so have I. I’ve added others. Today, I live it across five languages. And each one gives me access to a different version of myself.
Italian is like an ancient language: the archaeologist who discovers an older version of me with every word, awakening something primal and deeply rooted.
The language of my convictions. The one where I know how to advocate for myself with a force I don’t find anywhere else. But also a connection to others in simplicity.
French is surgical precision in emotional expression. Nuance, finesse, subtlety. It’s also the language in which I built myself as a woman and a professional.
English opens me up. I feel more vulnerable in it, less protected by the structures of my own language, but that vulnerability is also a door.
Spanish is the young adult discovering life. Something joyful, playful. A lightness the other languages don’t carry in the same way.
German never took root. And that in itself is information: not every language settles the same way. Some pass through. Others stay on the surface.
What I live across five languages, research names. It’s plurality.
What others reflect back at you
You speak the language. You know your field. And yet, there’s something.
For me, it was the anxiety linked to accent. The question of intelligibility: do people really understand me? Are they listening, or are they stopping at the way I speak?
The meta-analysis by Spence, Hornsey, Stephenson & Imuta (2024), published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows it clearly: speakers with a non-standard accent are systematically perceived as less hireable, less promotable, less credible in leadership positions. Dragojevic & Giles (2016) identified the underlying mechanism: lower cognitive processing fluency generates a negative evaluation, often entirely unconscious in the listener.
Accent is a stronger predictor of interpersonal judgment than either race or gender or looks in ethnic categorization, making the impact of accents particularly powerful.
The reality exists. The bias exists.
And the cracks in identity come from both sides at once.
From the inside: that movement that wants to adapt, succeed, belong.
From the outside: what others reflect back, or don’t.
You can have a solid identity. You can believe that protects you. And yet the cracks appear. Because you’re alive in a context that remoulds you.
Choosing how to rebuild
What helped me at that point was doing something completely unexpected.
I decided to act. Literally. I did theatre.
Scientist. Migrant. And amateur actress.
It was an almost plastic decision, to take that fragility, that awkwardness with words, and make it into material.
Because theatre teaches you one fundamental thing: you can take up space with your imperfections. You can choose to step into the light, not despite your uniqueness, but with it.
That layer added itself to my identity. And it stitched something back together. The thread that connects the different versions of you — the one from before, the one here, the one still searching — theatre made that thread visible to me.
The silent cost: when belonging becomes losing the thread
In my early years of expatriation, I was lucky enough to integrate quickly — professionally, personally. Some French friends still say to me today: we forget you’re a foreigner.
That’s one of the deepest forms of integration I’ve known. And I’m proud of it.
But there’s a cost I paid years later.
In certain professional contexts, you’re not just asked to adapt to the country’s culture. You’re asked to be a cultural fit — with the company’s codes, the sector’s codes, the codes of the specific group you’re joining.
And there, if you’re not careful, something dangerous happens: the need to belong takes over. That need is powerful. It’s human. And it can push you toward deep identity shifts — if you don’t see it coming.
Berry's (1997) acculturation model identifies four strategies: assimilation (adopting the new culture, discarding your own), separation (retaining your own, rejecting the new), marginalisation (rejecting both), and integration (holding both cultures present at once).
His research on acculturation has shown it for decades: the best psychological and professional outcomes are associated with integration, holding both identities present, and yet it’s often toward assimilation that we drift, without consciously deciding it, driven by that need to belong.
You start to polish. To erase. To adjust every layer of yourself to get closer to the image the group seems to value. And the others don’t always reflect back the signal that it’s working. So you keep going. You double down.
That’s the direct path to burnout.
From an excess of adaptation. From losing the thread that connects us to what we really are.
When the title becomes armour
Some people arrive in a new country for work. Work that represents years of study, an identity built over time. And something paradoxical happens: because they’re competent, because the professional environment welcomes them, because they don’t experience the anxiety of accent or intelligibility — they confuse their personal identity with their professional identity.
The title. The degrees. The position. It works. So they take shelter in it.
As I explored in a recent post: that armour is solid — until the professional environment itself becomes the source of the pain. Until things aren’t going well at work.
And then rebuilding is all the harder because they’ve forgotten they were something else. That they had other layers. Other threads.
That’s precisely why the layers I talk about in this post aren’t a luxury. They’re resources. They exist for the day when one of them falters.
Identity also absorbs cultural orientations
When you move through different cultural environments, you don’t just absorb habits or codes. You absorb cultural orientations, those deep ways of engaging with the world, relationships, work, and they end up becoming part of your identity.
Two concrete examples.
The first is mine. I come from the south of Italy. The affective orientation, the warmth, the smile — it’s culturally embedded in me. But I’ve understood, analysing my own trajectory, that this warmth had also amplified itself as an integration mechanism.
A recent study by Bobowik, Pizarro, Slawuta & Basabe (2026), published in the British Journal of Social Psychology, shows it across 2074 participants: smiling immigrants are perceived as warmer and more competent, but host societies can also condition this positive emotional expression. Rychlowska et al. (2015) had already shown that in historically heterogeneous cultures, smiling functions as a signal of non-threat and cooperative intent. A social survival strategy, often unconscious.
The problem? Depending on the culture, that same smile can be read as a lack of seriousness , or worse, as something that inspires distrust.
The second example is a client. He comes from a very indirect culture. But he spent years in the United States, absorbed a very direct orientation, and strongly identifies with that layer today. Which creates problems for him now that he works in a context that values precisely the indirect.
Our identity in transition is not a fixed identity. It absorbs. It layers. It grows more complex.
And that’s the good news: the cultural orientations we’ve integrated can be enriched by others still. We have the ability to behave differently depending on context — without losing the thread.
It would be a mistake to reduce your identity to a single cultural orientation, whether it’s the one you’ve carried from the beginning or the one you’ve absorbed along the way.
Identity in transition is plural by definition.
Identity in transition is an active process, made of layers that add themselves, cracks that appear, threads you find again or lose. Keep enough of them, and you can weave entirely a new identity on your own.
The question isn’t who were you before.
The question is: do you know the different parts that make you up? How do they live together?
A few steps to start the inventory:
1. Observe which facet of yourself expresses in which language. Each language activates a different version of you. Notice which one gives you access to something deeper, something the others don’t touch. Write in it. Think in that language even if the conversation will be in another. Let that version of you show up.
2. Find the thread you’ve lost. Think back to that person, that activity, that state of mind that described you — before the expatriation, before the last big change, before you started adapting. Plan that activity this week. Call that person. Don’t just name it. Do it.
3. Identify which part of yourself you’ve put on hold, and where it could be your greatest asset. Think of a specific professional context - a meeting, a negotiation, a project. What did you smooth over? What did you hold back? Identify one situation where that part of you would actually be your strongest card. Next time, show up with it.
If you want to explore what the transition has done to your personal and professional identity and find the thread again, three doors, depending on where you are:
→ Cultural Bridge Programme — map your orientations, understand what’s actually happening, and build the cultural intelligence to navigate it.
→ 1:1 Coaching — know who you are, transform awareness into intention and intention into action.
→ Cultural Bridge Hub — consider becoming a paid member and get monthly frameworks, tools and deep-dives for multicultural professionals navigating workplace dynamics.
References
Dewaele, J.M. & Nakano, S. (2013). Multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. → https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251880822
Koven, M. (2001, 2007). Cited in: Multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. → https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251880822
Spence, J.L., Hornsey, M.J., Stephenson, E.M. & Imuta, K. (2024). Is Your Accent Right for the Job? A Meta-Analysis on Accent Bias in Hiring Decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. → https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672221130595
Dragojevic, M. & Giles, H. (2016). The fluency principle: Why foreign accent strength negatively biases language attitudes. Communication Monographs, 84(3). → cited in: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X24001192
Berry, J.W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 46, 5–34. → https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3700543/
Bobowik, M., Pizarro, J.J., Slawuta, P. & Basabe, N. (2026). Smiling across borders: Host culture members’ reactions to happiness expressed by immigrants. British Journal of Social Psychology. → https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12780317/
Rychlowska, M. et al. (2015). Be Careful Where You Smile: Culture Shapes Judgments of Intelligence and Honesty of Smiling Individuals. → https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4840223/
Thanks for this post. I was relocated as a six-week-old child from the USA to South Africa. I lived in 5 different countries by the time I was 11. I am still unraveling the thread of who I am and found your post helpful.
The idea of “losing the thread” is beautifully put.
I especially appreciated how you connect language, accent, professional identity, and belonging without reducing identity to a simple before-and-after story. Expatriation does not just change where we live. It changes which version of ourselves gets permission to speak.
That line will stay with me.