The Between
On belonging, the places we carry inside us, and why the in-between is not a problem to solve
I’ve been thinking about what it means to belong somewhere.
Not the bureaucratic version, the passport, the residency, the address. But the felt version. The sense of being in a place where you don’t have to explain yourself. Where the references land. Where the context is shared without being stated.
Most of the people I’ve had the privilege of interviewing on this show don’t have that. Or rather, they have it in more than one place, which is not the same as having it simply. They live between countries, between languages, between versions of who they are expected to be.
What I’ve found, reading through the archive carefully, is that the between is not where the problem lives. It’s where the work comes from.
Belonging is not a prerequisite for creativity. For many of the most interesting creative people I know, the absence of simple belonging is exactly what made them.
When you fully belong to one place, one culture, one language, one set of unspoken assumptions about how the world works, a great deal is invisible to you. You don’t have the distance, because you’re inside it.
The person between two places has the distance. They see both worlds from a position that neither world fully occupies. They carry two complete sets of references, two ways of framing a problem, two approaches to time and beauty. And from that position, they can make connections that no one on either side can make alone.
This is not a comfortable position. The between can be lonely. It can feel like you are always the one explaining yourself, always the one who doesn’t quite fit the mould of either world.
But the creative yield of it is also real. And for the people I spoke to on my show, the between turned out to be not the obstacle to the work, but the source of it.
The between is not a waiting room. It’s a studio.
I want to say something about home that I think gets lost in conversations about belonging and identity and diaspora.
Home is not only where you come from. It can also be what you build.
Several of the people I’ve spoken to on this show have built it in places that had no prior claim on them. Through the quality of their attention to those places. Through the communities they formed, the tables they set, the spaces they created. Through the insistence on bringing something from where they came from into where they are — not as a museum piece, but as a living contribution.
The result is something that doesn’t have a clean name but that I recognise immediately when I encounter it: a table, a gallery, a kitchen, a radio station, that feels like it belongs to everyone who needs it. That doesn’t ask you to choose. That holds multiple origins without flattening any of them.
That’s not a compromise. That’s an achievement. And it tends to require exactly the kind of person who grew up between. Who learned, through necessity, how to hold more than one world at once.
Home is not only where you come from. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, what you build for others who are also between.
The question I keep coming back to is simpler than it might sound.
What if the in-between is not a phase? What if it’s not something to move through on the way to resolution, to a final answer about where you belong and who you are?
What if the between is the permanent condition, for more people than we admit, and the work is not to escape it but to make something from it that could only have come from there?
Every interesting creative life I’ve encountered on this show has been lived, in some sense, in the between. Between cultures, between disciplines, between the person they were expected to be and the person they turned out to be. The between is not the exception. For creative people, it may be the rule.
You don’t have to resolve the between. You have to make something from it. That’s the whole project.
If you are living between - between places, between identities, between the life you came from and the one you’re building - I want to offer this, not as consolation but as something more useful.
The between is not what you have instead of belonging. It’s what you have instead of a single answer. And a single answer, for someone who has seen more than one world, was never going to be enough anyway.
Episode 42 of Forward_Moves, Home Is Not a Place, is out now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Keep moving forward.
— Raja