The stories we carry across borders. Are you bringing yours or someone else’s?

When you hear the word immigrant, what comes to mind?

Recently, I asked two groups of people a simple question: what words come to mind when you hear the word immigrant? One group had experienced migration themselves and the other had not. I wasn't trying to prove anything, and I didn't have a theory about what the answers would reveal. I was simply curious about the stories that might sit behind a word we use so easily.

When I put the two groups of answers beside each other, though, I noticed something I hadn't expected.

The people who had migrated used words like struggle, poor, outsider, refugee, escape, challenge, integration, adaptation, guest, and may not be accepted. There were words of strength too, including valuable, contribute, quality and hard worker, but I was struck by how many of the words seemed to carry a sense of uncertainty, of needing to adjust, prove, navigate or find a place.

These weren't words I had given them. They were the words they reached for themselves.

The people who hadn't migrated told a noticeably different story. Their words included freedom, brave, resilient, proud, hardworking, industrious, family and multiculturalism. There were more complicated words too, including trauma, maligned, foreigners and different, but something about the overall picture caught my attention.

Looking from the outside, they seemed able to see strength and possibility in migration that wasn't nearly as visible in the words of the people who had actually lived it.

What stories do migrants learn about themselves?

That difference made me curious.

Whose narrative is being played out here?

When someone who has migrated describes an immigrant as a guest, an outsider, someone who may not be accepted or someone who needs to adapt, is that simply a description of the migrant experience?

Or are we hearing something else too?

Could we also be hearing a narrative about the person they have learned they are supposed to become after migration?

Perhaps that narrative says: be grateful, work hard, fit in, don't complain, learn how things are done here, prove your value, don't ask for too much.

Perhaps it says that belonging in a new country is something you have to earn rather than something you can expect.

And if those stories are running quietly in the background, I wonder what they ask of you.

Do they make you cautious when you want to speak?

Do they make you shrink an opinion, an ambition, a part of yourself?

Did you do everything that was asked of you to migrate, only to arrive here and become less of yourself?

Migration also tells a story about what you're capable of

Because migration itself tells another story about you.

You did something hard.

You navigated systems you didn't create, made decisions without knowing exactly where they would lead, left behind what was familiar and found your way through what wasn't.

Whatever your particular migration story looks like, you got yourself here.

That's part of migrant identity too.

So I wonder what becomes possible when I am a guest here is no longer the loudest story in the room and another story gets some space:

I belong here.

I can do hard things.

I can navigate this too.

I've got myself this far, and I'll get where I'm going next too.

I don't need to prove a thing.

This isn't about replacing a so-called negative story with a positive one or pretending that migrant belonging is simply a matter of changing how you think.

Racism, exclusion, unfamiliar systems, discrimination and the very real conditions of migration don't disappear because you tell yourself I belong here.

I'm interested in something different:

What does each story make possible?

If the story running in the background is I need to prove that I deserve to be here, what does that invite you to do?

And if the story becomes I don't need to prove a thing, what might you give yourself permission to do differently?

Which stories make you larger?

This is what I mean when I think about the stories that make us larger.

Larger doesn't have to mean louder, more confident, more ambitious or more successful. I don't get to decide what larger looks like for you.

I'm interested in the narrative running underneath your life that allows you to be more, rather than less, of yourself.

Maybe yours is I belong here.

Maybe it's I've done hard things before.

Maybe it's I can trust myself to work this out.

The question isn't whether you can find the "right" story.

It's which stories allow more of you to exist?

This is one of the reasons narrative therapy interests me when thinking about migration, belonging and cultural identity. Narrative approaches invite us to become curious about the stories through which we understand ourselves, where those stories came from, whose interests they serve and whether they still deserve the authority we have given them.

And perhaps that's why those two lists of words have stayed with me.

They made me wonder whether migration changes not only where you live, but the stories you learn to live by once you arrive.

Some of those stories may have protected you, helped you navigate uncertainty or made it possible to find your feet. But a story that was useful when everything was new doesn't necessarily have to accompany you forever.

At some point, you get to become curious about whether the story that helped you get here is also the story you want to take with you into whatever comes next.

Is there a kind of self-colonisation in the stories we carry?

It also makes me wonder whether there can be a kind of self-colonisation in the stories we carry.

What happens when a narrative that was created outside of you becomes the voice you use to govern yourself?

When nobody is actually telling you to be grateful, stay quiet, fit in or prove your worth anymore, but the instruction continues anyway?

The authority has moved inside.

The coloniser is now in your head, controlling you even when you are free.

Perhaps part of becoming more of yourself is beginning to ask:

Whose voice is that?

Does this story actually belong to me?

And do I still want to live by it?

That doesn't mean every story you have inherited needs to be rejected simply because it came from somewhere else.

We are all shaped by families, cultures, communities, institutions and the places we have lived. Cultural identity itself is made from many stories, and some of those inherited stories may be deeply precious to you.

The question is not Did this story originate with me?

It is:

Do I want this story to have authority in my life?

Does it connect you with the person you want to be, or does it keep asking you to become less of yourself in exchange for acceptance?

Who might you become?

Maybe freedom after migration is not only the freedom to live somewhere new.

Maybe there is another freedom available too: the freedom to examine the stories you were given about who you needed to become once you got there.

To keep the ones that make room for you.

To question the ones that diminish you.

And to begin authoring something different where you need to.

Who might you become if you stopped trying to be the person migration has taught you that you should be?

I don't know what your answer to that question is, and I don't want to give you one.

But I wonder what might happen if you started noticing the stories running quietly in the background.

I am a guest here.

I should be grateful.

I need to prove myself.

I shouldn't ask for too much.

Are they yours?

Are they still useful?

And what other stories are already there, perhaps spoken less often?

I belong here.

I can do hard things.

I can navigate this too.

I've got myself this far.

I don't need to prove a thing.

The most important question you should be asking yourself is:

Which stories allow you to become more of yourself?