Journaling Prompts for Immigration and Living Between Cultures
Living between cultures—whether you immigrated by choice or necessity, recently or long ago—carries a complexity that people who've always been in one place rarely fully understand. There's the practical work of belonging in a new place, and the quieter, ongoing work of figuring out who you are across two or more worlds. The longing for what you left. The guilt of sometimes preferring where you are. The strange experience of being an outsider in your old home and an outsider in your new one. Writing gives you a space to hold all of that without having to choose a side.
Journaling Prompts
What did you leave behind when you moved—not just places and things, but parts of yourself, ways of being, relationships? Write about those losses honestly.
What have you built or found in your new place that is genuinely yours, that you're glad you have? Let yourself acknowledge the real gains alongside the losses.
When do you feel most like yourself—most fully, most comfortably yourself? What context, what community, what language makes that possible?
What do you carry from your culture of origin that you hold onto deliberately, and what have you let go of or had to let go of? How do you feel about each?
What do you wish the people around you understood about what it's like to live this particular kind of life—the specific texture of it that doesn't translate easily?