Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 7 | Written Reflection

I’m writing this from North Carolina, though the story behind that sentence begins much further away. It starts in South Africa, travels through the United Kingdom, crosses the United States, and somehow keeps finding its way back home.

My partner and I recently drove from Montana to North Carolina, a ten day road trip across a country I’d lived in for years without ever quite seeing it properly. We passed through Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, through national parks and historic sites and landscapes vast enough to make a person feel genuinely small. It was beautiful. It was also, unexpectedly, heavy. Much of the route ran through land connected to Native and Indigenous communities, and alongside the natural beauty I noticed poverty, loss, and communities still carrying the weight of displacement and historical neglect reduced, elsewhere, to a paragraph in a textbook. I wasn’t prepared for how emotional that would make me, and I think that’s because I’ve spent a great deal of my own life thinking about what it actually means to belong somewhere.

One of the stranger things about cultural identity is that other people sometimes seem more confident about who you are than you’re ever required to be yourself. At one stop, a woman at a petrol station assumed I was Native American and began asking me about nearby trails as though I obviously knew the area. In South Dakota, another woman checked my identification and asked whether my name was my native name. Neither moment upset me exactly. If anything, both left me a little sad, because there’s something quietly uncomfortable about being confidently misidentified by someone with no real understanding of the identity they’re assigning you.

I am South African. I am also Coloured, a South African racial and cultural identity with its own specific historical and social context, and my heritage includes African, European and Indian ancestry among others. That identity doesn’t translate neatly into every country’s understanding of race, and that mismatch has been its own education. When I first started working in the United States back in 2017, a colleague once told me I couldn’t possibly be Coloured because I was African, and therefore, in his framework, I had to be Black. I remember thinking, quite genuinely, how are you arguing with me about my own identity. I tried explaining the South African context, including the fact that the word Coloured carries an entirely different history there than the slur it’s associated with in America. That conversation taught me something worth holding onto. Our cultural frameworks are not universal. American history is not world history. A word doesn’t automatically carry the same meaning simply because the spelling matches, and neither does identity.

There’s a psychological concept sitting underneath most of this, cultural identity, the part of our sense of self that develops through our connection to culture, ethnicity, nationality, language, tradition, belief, family and community. It isn’t handed to us at birth and quietly stored away. It develops through lived experience. We learn what’s considered normal, what’s acceptable, what makes us feel connected, and sometimes, unfortunately, we learn which parts of ourselves make other people uncomfortable. I learned that particular lesson very young.

My family moved from South Africa to North London when I was a child, and we spent roughly a decade in the United Kingdom. I want to be clear that the move itself was one of the better decisions my family ever made, full of genuinely beautiful memories, friendships and achievements. But being grateful for a chapter doesn’t require pretending every page of it was easy. On my first day at a British primary school, feeling academically confident and entirely comfortable in how I spoke, I was asked to count. The first word out of my mouth was nought. The classroom erupted into laughter. They asked me to repeat it. I did, and the laughter only grew. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. I’d simply used a word that made complete sense to me, and suddenly my own language had become a visible marker of difference. That was only the beginning. At break time I was called racial slurs, told by other African children that I couldn’t really be African because I didn’t look African, and handed labels like mixed breed and half caste that I had no framework yet to process. I only understood, as a child, that the version of myself I’d arrived with wasn’t being particularly well received. So I started adapting.

This is where psychology gives language to something I originally just experienced as trying to fit in. When people move between cultures, they often go through acculturation, the psychological and behavioural changes that develop through sustained contact with another culture. New social rules get learned. Expressions get picked up. The way you dress, speak, eat and even understand yourself can shift, sometimes exciting, sometimes painful, often both. For me, the first thing to change was my accent. I picked up local slang, adjusted my pronunciation, and grew genuinely anxious about reading aloud in class because my own voice had become something I was suddenly self conscious of. Eventually I got remarkably good at shifting it depending on company, though I didn’t have a name for what I was doing at the time. It was code-switching, the process of adjusting how we communicate depending on the social or cultural context we’re in, whether that’s language, accent, vocabulary, tone or behaviour. My South African accent came naturally at home. Around British friends, I adapted. It became genuine over time rather than performed, simply another real part of me that had developed alongside everything else. But there’s a meaningful difference between choosing how you communicate and feeling like you have to change how you communicate in order to be accepted, and that distinction matters enormously. Code-switching can be a genuinely useful social skill. It becomes something closer to self erasure when the underlying message shifts from flexibility to the way you naturally speak simply isn’t acceptable here.

My lunchbox became another quiet battleground. I remember opening it at school to good curry, the kind of properly flavourful, second day curry that genuinely earns its reputation, and clocking the turned noses and reactions from the kids around me. Eventually I stopped wanting those lunches at all and started choosing blander food instead. Looking back, I wasn’t simply changing what I ate. I was negotiating my own visibility. Food was home, family, culture, all at once, and when that culture started attracting unwanted attention, I quietly began hiding it. That’s one of the less obvious ways cultural assimilation actually happens, the gradual process through which someone from a minority or migrant group increasingly adopts the dominant culture around them, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because the environment simply makes adaptation feel necessary, and often without ever consciously deciding to do it. I loosened my tie. I rolled up my skirt. I asked my mother to stop walking me to school so I could walk home the way the other children did. I wasn’t thinking, today I will assimilate. I was a child trying to make friends, which is exactly why cultural identity and belonging are so tightly bound together. We don’t develop identity in isolation. We develop it in relationship with the people around us, and if those people repeatedly signal that certain parts of you are strange or embarrassing, that message tends to get absorbed long before you have the tools to challenge it. For a while I distanced myself from my Indian heritage too, even though my grandfather is Indian and that history is genuinely mine. The hostility I’d encountered made we want to quietly step away from it. That’s what makes experiences like this psychologically significant. The real problem was never simply that someone said something unkind. It’s the message sitting underneath it, that something about you makes you unacceptable here, and when you’re young, that message can settle in before you’re equipped to question it.

Migration rarely gets talked about in these terms. People discuss it as an adventure, a new home, a new school, a new opportunity, and all of that is true. What gets left out is the psychological labour of learning to exist inside an entirely different social environment while simultaneously trying to work out who you actually are. You’re not just learning where the supermarket is. You’re learning the unwritten rules, often while still a child, often while doing both at once.

I was proudly South African before I ever left. Growing up in a diverse, urban part of the country, with friends across different races and backgrounds, I simply hadn’t spent much of my childhood thinking consciously about race at all. Then, almost overnight, I found myself being categorised, questioned, labelled and corrected, moving from a place where my identity had felt entirely ordinary to one where parts of it suddenly needed explaining. And when I eventually returned to South Africa as an older teenager, I discovered I didn’t feel completely South African anymore either. I’d changed. I’d built independence, friendships and achievements in the UK, absorbed enough of that culture that coming home meant facing another, quieter kind of adjustment. I wasn’t automatically Coloured enough anymore, not because anything about my heritage had changed, but because my experiences had. This is something people rarely understand about cultural identity. Returning home geographically doesn’t automatically return you to the person who left. There’s a real term for the disorientation that can follow, reverse culture shock, and I lived through my own version of it, missing the independence and friendships I’d built abroad while simultaneously feeling a stronger pull back toward being proudly South African than I’d ever felt before leaving.

Eventually I stopped treating those identities as though they were in competition. I didn’t need to decide whether I was more South African or more British, because I could simply be both. That’s really where the idea of a bicultural identity becomes useful, identifying with and navigating more than one cultural framework at once, not by splitting yourself neatly in half but by letting different cultural experiences become part of the same whole person. The British part of me never made the South African part less authentic. It just meant I’d grown somewhere else too. Today I can genuinely value the independence the UK gave me alongside the hospitality, family closeness, respect for elders, food, music and warmth that shaped my South African upbringing, without needing to choose between them. That, I think, is the point at which cultural identity stops being about survival and starts being about ownership, because there’s a real difference between adapting because you have to and adapting because you have the freedom to choose what actually fits you.

Living in the United States as an adult gave me yet another version of this same lesson. I’ve fielded some remarkable questions about South Africa, plenty of assumptions about my race, my accent, my heritage, occasionally from people who couldn’t have located the country on a map. I’ve had to explain, repeatedly, that Africa is not a country, that South Africa carries its own distinct history, that being African doesn’t automatically determine someone’s race, and that being mixed doesn’t mean the person in front of you is confused about who they are. But something in me has genuinely shifted. The girl who once hid her curry is now considerably more comfortable talking about exactly where she comes from. The child who altered her accent to fit into a room now understands that her voice never needed anyone’s permission. The teenager who came home wondering whether she was still enough now knows identity was never something measured by how perfectly it fits someone else’s expectations.

What I’ve grown most comfortable with, honestly, is educating people who genuinely want to learn. There’s something worthwhile in that exchange, someone asks, I explain, they listen, and I usually learn something about them in return. That’s cultural curiosity at its best, and it’s worth distinguishing from its opposite. Being interested in another culture should never turn the person from that culture into a walking encyclopedia, and curiosity without humility curdles quickly into assumption. I don’t mind someone saying they don’t know much about South Africa and asking me to explain. What sits far less comfortably is being told, flatly, no, that isn’t what you are. There’s a real difference between not knowing and refusing to learn, and that distinction matters more and more in a world where increasing numbers of people are living across cultural boundaries rather than neatly inside one.

There’s an odd contradiction built into most immigrant experiences worth naming plainly. You leave because something mattered enough to make leaving worthwhile, and then you spend years defending exactly why the place you left still matters to you, your food, your language, your people, your history, sometimes defending yourself against misconceptions that were never accurate in the first place. I’ve done this from childhood well into adulthood, from a young girl explaining why she was African despite not matching someone else’s visual expectation, to a grown woman explaining what being Coloured actually means. But that lifelong translating has given me something real in return. It’s made me curious about other people’s cultures, interested in ancestry and migration, and considerably more alert to how quickly an us and a them can get invented out of very little.

Cultural identity was never only about asking who am I. Sometimes the more useful questions are who was I allowed to be, who did I have to become to feel safe, which parts of myself did I hide, which parts did I adapt, which parts did I eventually reclaim, and perhaps most importantly, which parts do I now actively choose to keep. For anyone who’s moved countries, married into another culture, grown up between cultures, been raised by immigrant parents, or simply never quite fit the cultural box other people expected them to occupy, those questions tend to land with real weight. Identity isn’t fixed. It evolves. Experiences leave marks, and so do people and places, some of which hurt, some of which teach, some of which end up making us considerably stronger. Which is worth remembering in both directions, because a careless comment about someone’s accent might feel insignificant to whoever says it, and a joke about someone’s lunch might be forgotten within minutes, but the person on the receiving end often carries it for a great deal longer. Children in particular are learning who they are largely through the reactions of the people around them, which means one of the more useful things any of us can practise in an increasingly multicultural world is becoming a little less certain about other people and a little more genuinely curious. Ask before assuming. Listen before correcting. Learn before judging. Someone’s difference is rarely a problem waiting to be solved. More often it’s simply a story you haven’t heard yet.

I think about all of this now from North Carolina, tracing the line from the girl who arrived in North London with her South African accent and her curry filled lunchbox, through the teenager who came home carrying pieces of Britain with her, to the woman who ended up in the United States once again explaining her own identity to strangers. I don’t feel divided anymore. I feel layered, and there’s a real difference between the two. I carry South Africa with me. I carry the UK with me. I carry every friendship, every place, every uncomfortable conversation and every version of myself that had to work out how to belong, and none of those versions needs to disappear for the current one to exist. That, I think, is what genuinely growing into a cultural identity looks like. Not becoming less of where you came from, and not becoming more of somewhere else, but growing secure enough in yourself to carry the whole collection at once. Belonging, in the end, was probably never about finding the one place you fit perfectly. It’s closer to reaching the point where you no longer need to edit yourself to fit anywhere at all.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.