I feel like much of this echoed what seemed to be my never-ending identity crisis.

Being born in the US, with a Jamaican influenced household had me confused as a child because my house was different from my friends and much of the country. As a child, I took it as: around these people I can “act Jamaican” and around Americans or people of other nationalities, I can “act American.”

Then at some point, cultures collided, where my brother and I felt like we needed to overcompensate being one nationality over the other in certain situations, I believe the spike in Jamaican pride increased after both of us spent a significant amount of time there during our childhood. And in the reverse, the spike in American defense stemmed from hearing cousins say very ignorant things and use where I live as a way to insult who I am as a person. For me personally, I started to get really defensive when someone said something very ignorant about Jamaicans, which is what I end up doing here in Taiwan when people made ignorant remarks about Americans or try to tell me about how I grew up because they assume to know everything about Americans just like how Americans assumed they know everything about Jamaicans when the reality is that most are only at the surface level and can’t really fathom experiences that shy around from media portrayal.

I think I’ve gotten to the point where I stopped trying to explain myself and just embraced how each of the three cultures shapes the person who I am today. I spent the month of February in America and being back made me realize how much being in Taiwan changed me and also what “home” really is because now there are three different countries, with three different ways of doing things, yet all three feel like home. It may say much about my willingness to adapt to new situations, but the familiarity made certain things seem normal (at least the good parts).

Every country has its good, bad, and ugly. I just take out of the positives and apply them to my everyday life and how I view the world.