Immigration & Cross-Cultural Experiences

My first memory in this world wasn't fear or trauma; it was an act of absolute community care in a war zone on the edge of a military base in Turkey.

I was from the only country that put military bases all over the world, and I was told we were there to protect civilians. I knew that kids were meant to be protected. The first act of protection I saw wasn't the fences or walls; it came from the street I lived on.

I remember overhearing bullets had been shot through the neighbor’s walls the night before. My parents had spent the day finding a random household of people we did not know who agreed to take me in if my parents died or the house blew up permanently. On our street, the community had spent months raising a lamb. They devoted themselves to this animal, charging it with purpose, knowing what it was for. As we took the door off our house, I was told the story of the care they had shown this lamb and what it meant to them. Later I was handed a knife and they asked me, as a two-year-old toddler, to take the lamb's life. I cannot remember if I did; it does not particularly matter. It was important that it was a community asking their youngest human and newest family to sacrifice their youngest animal for our wellbeing and safety.

Then came the move back to the States at age six, and with it, my first real encounters with racism, alienation, and the realization that we had been lied to about how the world worked. My father told me the lamb ritual wasn't his culture and wasn't my culture, finding it strange that I felt connected to it. In second grade, I realized I had a gender before I ever understood why skin color was weaponized: a girl fell down, and I froze, paralyzed by not knowing how or where I was allowed to touch her, until another girl ran up and helped her up.

That is how culture, race, and gender actually work. They are not abstract academic categories or polite diversity workshops. They are lived somatic encounters, rituals of collective care, moments of physical boundary enforcement, and the erasure that happens when people demand you abandon the very traditions that kept you alive and tell you "that's not your culture."

I don't really wonder if it kept a missile from taking my family. In a way, it worked. I felt the impact of community, culture, and making incredibly difficult choices to show that care. And that was far more powerful than a missile. I don't know what culture means to you but to me it is the people around me who make the choice to care. I have never been shown otherwise. 

I know this is not what you expected when you clicked this page and; honestly, I am bawling. I wrote this for me. I think that advocacy is a way to show care. I think the rest of my practice speaks for itself that I am a person who meets a foreign culture that is not my own or taboo topic with excitement. 

Topics

• Anti-Racist Theory (exposing state violence, redlining, displacement, and assimilation pressures)

• Embodiment & Feminist Theory (reclaiming physical touch, somatic memory, and bodily autonomy outside rigid gender policing)

• Human Development (understanding how childhood environments, border crossings, and cultural shifts shape nervous system adaptation)

• Social Model of Disability (framing unaccommodating cultural and legal systems as the source of harm rather than individual defect)

• Case Management and System Navigation/Advocacy (providing real-world backing for legal status, institutional friction, and material survival)

• Boundaries & Being in Relationship (rebuilding authentic relational safety across cultural divides and family expectations)