The Girl I Was, the Woman I Became: Growing Between Two Worlds

The first time I realised I was “between” worlds, I was eight. I was standing in the school corridor, clutching my notebook, when a girl in my class laughed at how I said the word bagno.
“È ba-gno, non bag-no,” she repeated, loud enough to make sure everyone heard the mistake.
I didn’t know why the sound of a consonant mattered so much, but I understood enough to go silent.

That’s how it started: not with some glamorous understanding of cultural identity, but with a vowel lodged in my throat.

A couple of years later, on a school trip to Bolzano, an old man called me negra as casually as someone commenting on the weather. He didn’t even look at me when he said it. The word was new, but my body understood instantly. I felt exposed, singled out, as if he’d pressed a finger into my forehead and said, You. That one.
Later, on the coach home, I rubbed Christmas-tree glitter onto my cheeks to look cute for a blonde classmate I had a crush on. He didn’t look at me once. I remember feeling confused — not just embarrassed, but fundamentally misplaced.

At home, silence was discipline. Outside, it became survival. I learned quickly that my skin, my hair, my mother’s cooking, the volume of my laugh — everything had consequences in Italy. I learned not to correct teachers who mispronounced my name. I learned to speak softly on buses. I learned how to adjust my tone depending on who stood in front of me.

Most of all, I learned to swallow questions before they reached my lips.

The girl I was thought this was adaptation. Integration. Maturity.
But adaptation has a cost. One day you wake up and realise you don’t remember the sound of your own voice.

There were moments when the silence cracked.
The days my mother fixed me with a sharp look mid-sentence, reminding me that my tone had limits even inside my own home.
The PE classes where classmates expected me to be good at sports because I was Black. The teacher once said I had “ossa pesanti” — heavy bones — and the class laughed. I remember wishing I could dissolve into the tiled wall before the hour-long humiliation began.

And then the bathroom mirror.

That scene deserves more than a sentence.
I was maybe fourteen. I would lean close to the mirror, staring at my full lips, my wide nose, my thick thighs. I lifted my nose with two fingers trying to make it slimmer. My mum had shown us that. Not maliciously — just as one of the ways women “refine” themselves. I didn’t question it yet.
I would tug at my thighs, wishing they took up less space.
I pressed my lips together, trying to imagine them thinner.
There was a period when I believed that if I could shrink myself small enough — quieter, lighter, softer — the world would finally stop seeing the foreignness in me.

None of these memories create a tidy arc. They don’t form a staircase from pain to empowerment. They’re scattered. Swollen. Still warm in places I pretend have healed.

If this were the kind of essay that wrapped itself in a bow, here’s where I’d say I found my voice in adulthood — through therapy, self-love, rituals, whatever feels motivational enough for a final paragraph.

But the truth is messier.

And travelling didn’t save me either.
I thought that if I just left Italy — the stares, the corrections, the weight of always justifying myself — I’d breathe easier. So I moved. Then moved again. I lived in cities across the UK, Italy, Paris.
People love to say travel expands your soul. Mine didn’t expand. It contracted.
Everywhere I went, the same assumptions followed me. The same micro-corrections. The same expectation to be grateful for existing in someone else’s country.
The healing I hoped would come from “newness” never arrived.

My voice didn’t come back at once.
It returned in fragments. Uneven. Inconvenient.

Like last week, when an older Italian man handed me his phone and said, “Dai, dammi il tuo numero.”
I said, “No, non lo do a chi non conosco.”
My heart was pounding because I had calculated three possible escape routes in my head before speaking. I was proud — but the fear stayed longer than the sentence.

Or the time I told a man I was attracted to that I wasn’t interested because something in his energy felt wrong.
Then spent the next day arguing with myself — had I misread? Overreacted? Been rude?
This is the part no one talks about: when your intuition protects you but your conditioning punishes you for listening to it.

The “I have a boyfriend” lie deserves context.
I use it often when I don’t know if a man is safe.
It works. It protects me. But afterward, guilt creeps in.
Not because I owe men honesty — I don’t — but because I resent that safety requires a fictional man to appear before my own “no” is respected. And I resent how normal this has become to me.

The truth I’ve avoided — the one you said still wasn’t on the page — is this:
Sometimes my voice doesn’t come when I need it.
And those are the moments I still can’t forgive myself for.

A few months ago, I froze.
A man at work made a sexual comment about a co-worker and then pulled my cheek in front of colleagues. It was demeaning, violating, and he knew it.
And I stayed silent.
Not because I didn’t feel anger — I did.
Not because I didn’t know he was wrong — I did.
But because my body went back to eight years old in an instant.

This isn’t just shame.
It’s also rage.
Because the man who did the harm walked away untouched, and I carried the weight alone — replaying the moment for weeks, imagining the words I should have said, mourning the girl who learned silence so young that even now, as an adult, I sometimes feel owned by it.

Then there’s my father.

My voice is never more fragile than when I use it with him — or my mother, but I’m not ready to go there on the page yet.
The last time we argued, he asked me to do something I didn’t have the time or emotional space for. Normally, I would have folded out of duty, or fear, or habit. I still can’t tell which drives me more.
But something gave way inside me.
I said, “Non ho tempo.”

My hands began sweating.
I held the sentence longer than I felt safe.
He paused too long, searching my face as if trying to recalculate who I had become. Confusion. Irritation. Maybe disappointment.
For a second, I almost took it back.
But I didn’t.
I stood there, thirty-five years old, refusing to shrink.
He finally nodded and said, “No wahala.”

That moment didn’t fix us.
It didn’t rewrite our past.
But something cracked open — not between us, but inside me.

I wish I could say my voice is grounded now. Or consistent. Or unwavering.
Some days it is.
Other days, the old silence returns, especially at work surrounded by white and white-passing colleagues who will never understand the weight of being the only Black woman in the room.

But now, when I go quiet, it isn’t always fear.
Sometimes it’s boundaries.
Sometimes it’s choosing not to perform.
Sometimes it’s the little girl inside me who still startles easily — but at least now she knows I’m here with her, not abandoning her to handle the world alone.

I’m not healed.
I’m practising.
And practice hurts more than anyone admits.

The woman I’m becoming says her full name — Sidiqot Abimbola Abale — with steady breath. I still flinch when someone mispronounces it, but now, instead of swallowing the correction, I sometimes say it back clearly.

Not always.
But sometimes.
And “sometimes” is enough proof that I’m still moving.

If something in this piece touched a place you’ve hidden from yourself, write down the first moment you learned to silence your voice. Don’t soften it. Don’t ornament it.
In my following newsletter, I’ll share a story I’ve never said publicly — the moment my voice failed me again in adulthood, and what it taught me about the parts of myself I’m still unlearning.