On Being From Everywhere and Nowhere: An Immigrant's Education

When people ask where I am from, I pause.

Not because I don’t know the answer, but because the answer is long and the question is usually not designed for a long answer. People are expecting a city, a country, a clean one-word reply. What I have instead is a layered story that starts in Malmö and runs through the Neretva delta and the Pelješac peninsula and ends, for now, in San Diego, with Croatia pulling at me from across the Atlantic every summer.

I was born and raised in Sweden. My family is Croatian. The sea I dream about is the Adriatic. The city I call home now is built against the Pacific. I hold all of these places inside me simultaneously, and they do not always agree with each other.

What Immigrants Know

There is a particular kind of knowledge that comes from living between cultures, and it is not the kind that shows up on a resume or a transcript.

It is the knowledge of what is arbitrary. When you grow up inside a single culture, that culture’s norms, its assumptions about how to greet people, how to negotiate disagreement, what counts as rude and what counts as direct, feel like reality. They feel like simply the way things are. When you grow up between cultures, you see immediately that these norms are choices. They are contingent. Another set of people, equally sensible, equally human, does it differently.

This is both liberating and disorienting. Liberating because it means you are never fully captured by any single system. You can always see it from outside. Disorienting because it means you never fully belong anywhere, and belonging is something human beings need.

Two Worlds, One Childhood

My Croatian identity was never in question, even growing up in Sweden. We watched Croatian news at home. We went to the Croatian Catholic church, and I did every sacrament in Croatian: baptism, first communion, confirmation. The language of faith and family was Croatian, and that shapes something deep in you, something that does not go away just because your school day happened in Swedish.

Every summer, we drove back. Long days on the road with my father behind the wheel, cutting through Europe toward Dalmatia. My father loved those drives. He loved arriving, loved showing us the country he came from, sharing it with his family. There was something in him that came alive the closer we got to the coast.

What waited at the end of those drives was my grandfather and his garden. He kept bees and the honey he made was unlike anything I have tasted since: raw and intensely floral, straight from the comb. He dried figs from the tree in the yard. The warm days and warm nights, a house full of cousins and neighbors and friends moving between the kitchen and the courtyard, the specific unhurried generosity of people who have nowhere else to be. Those summers did more to form my sense of who I am than almost anything else.

Sweden gave me something too, and I do not want to shortchange it. The Swedish belief that society has a collective responsibility for its members shaped how I think about justice. The quiet civic competence of the place is real and worth respecting. And then there is fika, the deliberate pause in the middle of the day for coffee and something sweet and actual conversation. It sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It reflects a cultural insistence that work does not get to colonize every hour, that people deserve to sit together and talk without an agenda. I carry that with me.

But my roots are Croatian. They were always Croatian. Growing up in Sweden was the circumstance. Croatia was the inheritance.

Croatia also gave me history. Real, painful, recent history. My father was deeply involved in the Croatian independence movement during the Yugoslav Wars. He saw the war coming before the international community was willing to acknowledge it. He wrote to embassies, appeared on national television, gathered testimony from people the regime called terrorists and the resistance called heroes. Growing up with that in the background gave me an understanding of what is at stake when states fail and nationalism turns violent. It is not abstract for me. It never has been.

The Experience of Not Quite Fitting

Being an immigrant means spending a great deal of your life in the condition of not quite fitting.

In Sweden, I was Croatian. That was fine; Sweden is a tolerant country. But I was always aware of carrying something that my Swedish classmates did not carry. The assumptions they moved through life with were not quite my assumptions.

In Croatia, I was one of the family, completely and without question. The cousins treated me as one of them because I was. But I had grown up elsewhere, shaped by a different school system, a different pace of daily life, and that was occasionally visible in ways that were hard to pin down.

This experience, of being genuinely connected to several places without being reducible to any single one, is not rare. There are hundreds of millions of people who live this way. But it is not how most political and cultural discourse is organized. Most discourse assumes that people have a single clear origin, a single nationality, a single home. The reality for an enormous proportion of the world’s population is far more complex than that.

What San Diego Taught Me

San Diego was not a place I expected to stay. It became home anyway, the way places do when you stop thinking of them as temporary.

It is a genuinely beautiful city, and I say that without sentimentality. The Pacific coastline, Torrey Pines, the chaparral in the hills: there is a spare, dry openness to this landscape that is nothing like Sweden and nothing like Dalmatia, and I found I liked it more than I anticipated. But what interested me more than the geography was the social reality.

San Diego is a border city, and border cities have a particular relationship to the question of belonging. The lines that divide nations are drawn by governments, but the people on both sides of those lines move through them as best they can, seeking family, work, safety, possibility. The border here is visible and contested in ways that are painful and often unjust. Living here made my thinking about immigration more concrete, less theoretical, more honest about the gap between how people talk about movement and what movement actually looks like for the people doing it.

Immigration Is Not a Problem

I want to say something plainly: immigration is not a problem to be solved. It is a fundamental feature of human experience.

People have always moved. They move toward safety, toward opportunity, toward family, toward a better chance at a decent life. The idea that this movement is somehow aberrant, something that requires control and restriction and management and suspicion, is historically strange. For most of human history, the question was not whether people moved but how they were received when they arrived.

What I know from my own experience is that immigrants bring things with them. Not just labor, not just bodies to fill roles in an economy, but perspectives, histories, ways of seeing that would not otherwise be present. The kid who grows up between cultures and has to translate not just languages but entire worldviews, that kid develops a capacity for empathy and analysis that is genuinely useful. The society that welcomes her gets something in return.

I am that person. And I know what it costs a society to treat what I carry as a liability.

Still Translating

I still translate. Not just between Swedish and Croatian and English, though I do that too. Between ways of seeing. Between the European and the American. Between the person who has lived through history and the person for whom history is a subject studied in school. Between the worldview that takes borders for granted and the one that knows, from direct experience, how contingent those lines actually are.

This is not a romantic position. It comes with real costs: the sense of never fully belonging anywhere, the exhaustion of constant code-switching, the loneliness of being the person in the room who holds two contradictory things as equally true. But it also produces a clarity about what is actually universal and what is just local custom dressed up as common sense.

That clarity is worth something. I intend to keep using it.