Sorry

Sometimes, I don’t know where I belong. My mother is French and I lived in France, my dad is German, and I moved to the United-States when I was eleven. When I moved to the United-States, I was the French kid. When I visited Europe, I was the American kid.I like to think I got lost somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

I felt stuck between multiple cultures. I was always trying to be more French, be more German, but I couldn’t keep up with all the countries. I thought that doing things like Americans is like giving up your country. I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence and being in a country where I felt uncomfortable talking made it harder for me to be confident.

When I visited France and Germany last summer, a lot of these fears went away. It was like I was finally free from a net of responsibilities that I trapped myself in when I moved. I figured out that there are no rules on how to live based on where you come from and that people in my countries don’t care if I do everything like a French or German person. I also realized that even in the US, people didn’t care that I wasn’t American and, in the contrary, they wanted to learn about my countries.

Now I learned that belonging to different countries doesn’t have to be a burden. I don’t belong to a place or a country, but I belong to myself and I can make of myself whatever I want to be.