Holding Multitudes: Cultural Threads Across Borders | Part 3: Professional Insights, Personal Truths

Professional Insights, Personal Truths

As the years flowed by, Emily's academic interests turned toward understanding the human psyche and its relationship to belonging. After completing postgraduate studies to become a therapist, a work opportunity for her partner brought them to Canada - a place she never imagined living.

The multicultural tapestry of Toronto surprised her with its richness, as did the beauty of the natural world with its echoes of familiarity. "My friends there were Syrian, Lebanese, Indian, Jamaican, Danish... a microcosm of the world." She also realized how many childhood references came from North American landscapes. “It gave me a strange sense of connection - I hadn’t realized how familiar it would feel.”

Her Canadian experience became an unexpected opportunity to recognize a hidden cultural thread she didn’t know she carried, and the living mosaic she inhabited provided fertile ground for deeper reflection on identity's complex nature.

As a therapist, Emily further navigates these convergences of identity daily. She sees how labels - whether cultural or clinical - can help us understand and communicate, but they also risk flattening complexity. "We're not just one thing," she says. "A diagnosis or a cultural label might be part of the story, but it's never the whole thing."

Emily encourages her clients to embrace nuance, just as she does. She sees identity as layered, lived, relational. And she continues to embody that belief - finding herself not in static definitions, but in the fluid movement between places, languages, and relationships.

"We carry multitudes," she says. And for Emily, that's not just a comforting thought. It's a way of life and something to celebrate.