The first thing you did when you walked into our house was take off your shoes. Nobody had to tell you, and to be sure, if you forgot, somebody would clear their throat just loudly enough for you to remember. Before you had fully settled onto the couch, someone was already asking if you wanted something to eat. It was one of those questions that wasn’t really a question.
“You eat already?”
“Well, have a little fruit.”
“No, no. That’s not enough.”
Five minutes later you were holding a plate you never intended to eat from because declining required far more energy than accepting. Meanwhile, three conversations were happening at the same time. Somebody was explaining a point with enough passion that a stranger might have considered calling for backup. Somebody else had entered the conversation halfway through without knowing what anyone was talking about, but was contributing anyway, loudly. Laughter interrupted every few minutes because someone remembered a story that absolutely had to be told before dinner. If you weren’t familiar with a Guyanese family, you might have mistaken all that noise for conflict. It wasn’t. We were just home and that was the language of home.
Then I would walk outside. And the world beyond my front door knew nothing about any of those unwritten rules. Most of the people I encountered outside of my home, didn’t know why taking off my shoes felt automatic. Nobody understood why refusing food made me slightly uncomfortable or why a room full of overlapping conversations felt comforting instead of chaotic. Outside of my house, I wasn’t “the Guyanese girl.” I was a Black woman. That wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story.
As I got older, another world opened up. School, work, boardrooms, conferences, networking events, doctor’s offices, airports. Every public space came with its own expectations. Some were spoken. Most weren’t.
Somewhere along the way, I became fluent in moving between all three worlds.
At home, I instinctively knew when to jump into a conversation before someone had technically finished their sentence because waiting for complete silence meant you might never get a turn. At work, I learned to wait.
At home, everyone understood the joke before you reached the punchline. At work, the joke occasionally required so much context for me to understand it, that it wasn’t funny anymore.
None of these ways of being were better than the others.nThey were simply different. The funny thing is that after enough years, my brain started making these adjustments before I consciously noticed the room. I began to choose one story instead of another; replace language because I knew it wouldn’t translate. I began editing what I shared because I didn’t necessarily want to spend time explaining a family tradition or cultural norm.
The biggest edit was making sure my face wasn’t participating in the meeting without my permission because it definitely has a long history of independent decision-making.
People often describe women like me as adaptable. They’re right. What they don’t see is the amount of thinking that happens before I ever open my mouth. There’s a quiet calculation that is always running in the background. Will this make sense here? Do I explain that reference? Will they hear what I mean or only what they’re expecting to hear? Do I have the energy to translate today?
Some days the answer is yes. But more often than not I would like to tell a story without adding footnotes. Or laugh without first deciding whether everyone in the room will understand why it’s funny. Just about everyday I would like to say a word the way my family says it without wondering whether someone will ask me to repeat myself or worse publicly correct me like my seventh grade teacher did.
None of this feels extraordinary because it has become so ordinary. It is the rhythm of moving through the world while carrying more than one culture inside you. I know I’m not the only woman who does this. Maybe your family came from Guyana. Maybe it was Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, the Dominican Republic, or somewhere else entirely. Maybe your family has been in America for generations, but your home still had its own language, rules, humor, and way of seeing the world.
Whatever your story, you probably know what it feels like to leave one world in the morning and spend the rest of the day navigating another. Then you come home and switch back without ever thinking about it. The movement is so familiar that it almost disappears. Almost.
Every now and then I’ll meet another woman who understands this without needing a lengthy explanation. She laughs at the right places, finishes the story before I do, and understands why home isn’t just a place in driving distance. It’s a way of moving through the world that never completely leaves you, even after you’ve learned how to move through several others. Those conversations always leave me feeling a little lighter. Because, for a little while, neither of us had to translate.
