Blog
I was eight when we left the Azores.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but I could already feel the tension inside me: the part that longed to stay — held by family, neighbors, routines, the smell of the ocean, and the part that wanted to leave, to become an American, to build a life that felt bigger than the one I knew.
Leaving wasn’t a choice in the way adults talk about choice.
It was a pull.
A hope.
A story.
When we boarded the plane, I so excited by what was about to come, thinking:
This is how you become something. You go somewhere else.
On the islands, identity was woven through relationships.
In the new world, identity was something you were supposed to carve out alone.
That shift — belonging as given, selfhood as earned, shaped more of my life than I realized.
When we arrived in the U.S., the message was clear, even if no one said it out loud:
Being someone meant being separate.
Strong.
Independent.
Unattached.
Success was a horizon you chased on your own legs.
I worked hard.
I hustled.
I built skills.
I built businesses.
I started projects and took risks and pushed myself because I thought that’s what you do when you’re trying to build a name for yourself — an identity.
And slowly, without noticing, something shifted.
The more I succeeded, the more I separated.
The more I accomplished, the more I distanced myself from where I came from.
The more I tried to “be someone,” the lonelier the journey became.
Individualism has a strange gravity.
It promises freedom while pulling us away from the web that makes us possible.
People talk about loneliness as if it’s something that happens when others leave.
But there is another kind of loneliness —
the kind that grows quietly when you leave.
When you move so far into your story that no one can walk with you.
When you build an identity strong enough to stand alone, and then realize you are standing alone.
In those years, I tried to be self-reliant.
Self-directed.
Self-contained.
But life is not built for self-containment.
It is permeable.
Relational.
Shaped by the ways it meets and responds to everything around it.
Every organism, every cell, every ecosystem is defined not by its boundaries,
but by its exchanges — the constant flow of signals, nutrients, attention, and response.
Individualism took that biological reality and rewrote it as a cultural ideal:
Who you are is what you can do alone.
It is a story so normalized,
so endlessly repeated,
that I lived it for decades.
Looking back, I can see that interdependence was in me long before I understood it.
In high school, I was a teaching assistant for the ESL class. The students were new to the country, still learning English, still navigating the shock I knew so well. Whenever I saw them struggling in other classes, I couldn’t help myself. I stepped in. I sat with them, explained homework, translated ideas, and helped them find their footing.
One day, a teacher told the ESL instructor, Runa Larsen, that I was falling behind because I was spending too much time helping others. The warning was clear:
Hand in your own work, or you might fail.
I tried to explain to Runa that the other students needed help, and I couldn’t just watch them struggle alone. It felt impossible to choose my own grade over someone else’s wellbeing.
At the time, it felt like a choice I couldn’t make.
But now I see it differently:
I wasn’t resisting homework.
I was resisting separation.
The educational system was designed to compel individual achievement.
But my instincts were shaped by community: by the islands, by family, by the intuition that we rise together or not at all.
Even then, I was being taught one story while living inside another.
A few years later, I ran into one of those students — a Korean girl named Susan who hadn’t even known her anglicized name when she first arrived. I was walking through Newpark Mall, and there she was, a student at San Jose State University, confident, thriving. We talked for only a few minutes, but something in me cracked open.
I don’t know what those months of one-on-one work meant for her.
But in that moment, the emotion came rushing back: the belonging, the connection, the shared effort of two people finding their way in a new language and a new world.
It reminded me of something I didn’t yet know how to articulate:
Our identities don’t form in isolation — they form in relationship.
It took collaboration to bring me back.
Not the collaboration of teamwork-as-transaction,
but the kind where something comes alive between people.
I felt it in my companies when we were building things that none of us could build alone.
I’ve felt it again recently in Radical World and Serving Life, not as concepts, but as experiences:
The moment when someone else’s insight unlocked mine.
The moment when contribution turned into connection.
The moment when creation felt shared, not owned.
That feeling was familiar.
Ancient.
Maybe island-born.
Belonging.
Not the belonging of place,
but the belonging of participation.
It reminded me that identity is not a fortress we build around ourselves.
Identity is something that emerges in the spaces between us.
The self is not a closed system.
It is a node in a living web.
Through the Story Lens, the individual is:
This version of the individual is the one we learn to admire.
But it is also the one that leaves us isolated.
Through the Life Lens, the individual becomes:
Life doesn’t create isolated selves.
Life creates interfaces — ways for us to participate in something larger.
The Story Lens elevates independence.
The Life Lens reveals interdependence.
The Story Lens says you find yourself by standing apart.
The Life Lens says you find yourself by being a part.
One creates identity through separation.
The other creates identity through relation.
Life has no solitary beings.
Even the most “independent” organism is an ecosystem of relationships —
microbes, nutrients, signals, flows.
What we call “the individual” is simply the place where many relationships meet.
Our stories forgot that.
We turned individuality into isolation.
We took a biological reality — interdependence — and replaced it with a cultural performance.
But life keeps demonstrating something quieter, more real:
You are not a self-made person.
You are a collaboratively shaped part of a living web, informed by influences, conditions, histories, and relationships.
Your gifts come alive when they are received.
Your ideas expand when they are met.
Your identity becomes real when it resonates with others.
Who you are is something that happens in relation, not away from it.
Growing up in the U.S. made me think identity was something I had to build alone.
But everything meaningful in my life has come through collaboration, through the ways people shaped me and the ways I shaped them in return.
When I look back now, I can see the arc:
belonging → separation → self-making → loneliness → collaboration → belonging again
The island wasn’t a place I left.
It was a way of being I forgot, and then remembered through others again.
So the question isn’t:
Who are you when you stand alone?
The real question is:
Who do you become among?
Because the individual is not an island.
The individual is an intersection of others: a meeting place.
And it’s only when we return to that truth,
the one life demonstrates everywhere you look,
that we begin to recognize ourselves again.