On Being Between Worlds

I’ve lived twelve years outside Brazil, ten of them in Denmark — long enough for the ground under my feet to become a trilogy.
Some days I feel the three countries inside me arguing for custody of my personality.

In Portuguese, I’m an anarchist.
In English, a capitalist-centrist who believes in long paragraphs and emotional honesty.
In Danish, I accidentally become a mild socialist — sometimes even a Marxist if someone says “det er ikke nødvendigt.”

And in gestures, I’m unmistakably Italian.
Of course.
Why be one thing when I can be five?

The truth is: I don’t belong to one place anymore.
I belong to the in-between — a beautiful, exhausting, multilingual corridor where I switch personalities like outfits.

The first moment I knew I was “from nowhere”

It wasn’t when I moved to Portugal.
It was the day I packed everything again and moved to Denmark.
That second move wasn’t an adventure — it was definitive.
A before/after.
You leave, but you also unroot, and no one prepares you for the emotional paperwork that follows.

What hurts the most

It isn’t the snow.
Or the language that sounds like a potato lodged permanently in someone’s throat.

It’s this:
realizing how deeply cultural I am –
and how culture cuts like a homesick knife.

I miss food, of course (I’m Brazilian, it’s genetic).
But I also miss the reason for laughter.
That specific kind of Brazilian ridiculousness that hits at 1 a.m. and makes you cry-laugh for ten minutes straight.
I haven’t found that anywhere else.

But then I look at my twin daughters —
and suddenly I have two small Brazilians giggling in the living room,
who laugh in three languages
and save me every day without knowing it.

What heals

Cooking something from home.
Brazilian TV on a random Tuesday.
Instagram reels of people dropping “eita”, “oxe”, and “pelamordideus.”

The small rituals of who I was blending with who I am becoming.
The magic of surviving abroad is that “home” becomes portable.

The three versions of me

English made me sweeter —
soft, affectionate, a little romantic in a way my teenage self would mock.
My love language was built in English.

Portuguese is my whole spectrum:
melodrama, brilliance, chaos, rage, poetry, shouting at the void, and apologizing five minutes later.
My Portuguese self is a genius diva with too many emotions and zero patience.

Danish…
Well. Cof cof.
Danish is the survival mode version of me —
a slightly confused elderly man who forgot why he entered the room.
I participate in conversations the way tourists participate in local festivals:
smiling vaguely, clapping two seconds late.

Visiting family

When I’m with my husband’s Danish family, my brain often flees the scene.
Not out of disrespect — out of self-defense.
It simply cannot process that many consonants per minute.

Going back to Brazil

Every time I visit, I feel like a foreigner.
I arrive homesick and leave homesick — but for different places.

My dream scenario is simple:
go to the corner, eat pastel and caldo de cana, and return immediately…
to Denmark.
I want Brazil close, but not too close.
I want Brazil on my street, not on my skin.

Living between worlds means living in all of them at once

I talk to people in Denmark, and Brazil, and the space in-between.
My life is a time zone puzzle.
My routine is divided between languages, cultures, expectations.
I fit everywhere and nowhere.
Which is oddly freeing.

What I gained

(Weight… kidding – but not.)
Perspective.
Humor.
Multiple identities.
A kind of emotional elasticity I didn’t know was possible.
And new ways to stress myself out, naturally.

What I lost
Only my job — temporarily.
Denmark is… complicated.
Finding work in English in a country allergic to not speaking Danish is a sport.
But not impossible.
I’ve done it twice.

What still hurts

Prejudice.
The hidden kind.
The polite kind.
The kind that pretends it isn’t there but always reveals itself in tone, in silence, in bureaucracy.
It still scares me.
It still surprises me that it exists – even after all these years.

But here is what I know now

Being between worlds is not a tragedy.
It’s a metamorphosis.
A multi-language upgrade.
A beautiful chaos.

I didn’t lose a country.
I gained multiple selves.

And yes — sometimes I speak in the wrong language at the wrong moment.
Sometimes I feel foreign everywhere.
Sometimes I feel at home in places that don’t make sense.

But every version of me is true.
Every language is a room I walk into.
Every country left a door open.

And I belong to all of them –
and to none of them –
simultaneously.

Which, in its own strange way,
is finally starting to feel like belonging.