The experience of living abroad forced me to redefine not only who I am, but perhaps more strikingly, who I am not. The sense of detachment, of no longer belonging, grew powerful enough to reshape my self-perception. I came to see culture as a collection of shared habits and rituals, external to me, and realised I was neither bound by those of my homeland nor absorbed into those of the society I had entered. The pronoun ‘we’ slipped away; only ‘I’ remained, untethered and apart.
This separation carried both liberation and risk. Freed from the ballast of inherited identity, I could encounter other selves without judgement, expectation or the weight of my own past. Yet ballast, once lost, also means losing the comfort of gravity beneath your feet.
Exile traces that tension between soaring and drifting, belonging and estrangement, ground and air.
London, August 2025