The idea for Edgewalkers Collective started at the end of last year. In January, I began asking a question I couldn’t put down.
I wondered whether people who have lived five or more years outside their passport country experience a kind of split between the person they were at home, and the person they’ve become where they live now.
I called it a schism of selves: one version of you tied to the place you came from, another tied to the place you live, and a sense that neither travels fully to the other.
For me, it was the way I toggled between widening my spatial awareness when visiting the US while not batting an eye when a stranger rubbed shoulders with me on the street in Spain. Or the way I watched my volume, tone, directness, or context delivery change depending on which cultures I was interacting with on my travels.
That was my starting question. The five-year mark was simply where I started, a way of finding people who had been away long enough to have a history with both places. What I didn’t expect was how quickly the question of when would stop being the whole point.
By the time you read this, I will have had nearly 50 research conversations in my Edgewalkers corpus, and readership of this Substack has surpassed 54 countries. I’ve brought this work to an intercultural conference in Valencia and into two in-person workshops with international professionals here in Madrid. Each of those settings was different, and I don’t want to flatten them into one story. But listening across all of these conversations has changed what I care about most — and where I’d like to take this research next.