The restaurant was warm and full that evening, the kind of place where the owner moves between tables as though every guest were family. I had been invited by a man I knew, and when the bill came he waved it away with a generous smile and told me there was no need. I thanked him, and then I paid anyway. I insisted, gently but firmly, and in the end they accepted the money.
I did not do it to make a point. I did it to protect something. In my world, and especially as a woman who has built a business from nothing, I have learned that the cleanest relationships are the ones where nothing is owed. I wanted him to know I valued his work, that his food and his time deserved to be paid for, and that our connection would never turn into a favour waiting to be called in. To me, paying was an act of respect.
To him, I later discovered, it was arrogance. He had taken my money, and then he had taken offence, as though my insisting had been a way of placing myself above him.
I have thought about that evening many times since, and one question keeps returning to me. If my name was Elizabeth, if I had walked into that restaurant with a different accent and a different passport, would he have read the very same gesture as arrogance? Or would he have smiled and said, how thoughtful of her, how gracious, what a lovely woman?
I think we both know the answer.
Belonging to two shores, and fully to neither
There is a loneliness that so many immigrants carry and rarely speak about, because it is difficult to explain to anyone who has not lived it. When you leave the country you were born in and build a life in another, you imagine you are adding a second home. What many of us discover instead is that we slowly lose our full place in both.
In the country we live in, we are welcomed, yet there remains a line we can feel even when no one draws it. We are the woman with the interesting accent, the one whose name people apologise for before they attempt it, the one who is asked where she is from, and then where she is really from. We are celebrated for our food, our colour, our story, and still, in moments that matter, we are read through a slightly different lens.
And then we go home, or we sit with our own community here, and we find that we have become a little foreign there too. We have changed, they tell us. We have become too independent, too direct, too English, too busy, too successful in ways that unsettle people. The very qualities that helped us survive in a new country are the ones that make us strangers to the people who knew us first.
So we live in the space between, translating ourselves in both directions, and wondering whether anyone sees the whole woman at all.
The weight of expectation from our own
I want to be honest about something that is rarely written about, because it feels like a betrayal to say it out loud. Some of the heaviest expectations I have witnessed do not come from the country we moved to. They come from our own people.
When a woman from our community builds something abroad, a business, a platform, a name, a certain story begins to circulate around her. She has made it, so she must now open every door. She must give introductions, tickets, time, money and favours without limit, and she must do it with a smile. If she says no, if she sets a boundary, if she charges for her work the way any British woman in her position would, she is told she has forgotten where she came from. Her success is welcomed only as long as it is shared on other people’s terms.
I have seen talented women exhaust themselves trying to meet these expectations, carrying the hopes, the comparisons and sometimes the resentment of people who never stood beside them while they were building. I have felt that weight myself. And I have come to understand that much of it comes from love tangled up with fear, from people who are watching one of their own rise and do not yet know whether it means there is room for them too.
Understanding it does not make it lighter. But it does help me stop mistaking their expectations for my obligations.
The racism that never raises its voice
When people imagine racism, they often picture something loud and unmistakable. What most of us live with is far more subtle, and in some ways harder to name, because it hides inside ordinary moments and leaves you wondering whether you imagined it.
It lives in the compliment on how good your English is, offered after twenty years in the country. It lives in the woman who is called passionate or intense for saying exactly what her British colleague would be praised as clear and decisive for saying. It lives in generosity being received as a strategy, honesty being received as attitude, and ambition being received as a little too much. It lives in the way the same behaviour is interpreted differently depending on who it comes from.
I once offered a woman honest feedback on her events. I gave it privately and carefully, the way I would want someone to speak to me, drawing on more than ten years of organising events of my own and a genuine wish to see her succeed. It was received not as support, but as criticism from someone who believed she knew better. I sat with that for a long time, asking myself whether my words had been wrong, or whether my name had arrived in the room before my intention did.
If my name was Elizabeth, I believe it would have been called mentorship.
I want to be fair here, because fairness matters to me. Not every misunderstanding is prejudice. People bring their own wounds, their own pride and their own histories into every exchange, and sometimes a gesture simply lands badly. But when the same pattern repeats across years, across rooms and across people, it stops being a coincidence and becomes something worth naming.
What it costs a woman to keep translating herself
The
of all this is not a single uncomfortable evening or an awkward conversation. It is what happens inside us over time.
We begin to edit ourselves before anyone else has the chance to. We soften our generosity so it will not be mistaken for showing off. We hold back our honest opinion so it will not be heard as arrogance. We adjust our accent on the phone, laugh a little longer at the joke about our name, and shrink our success when we go home so no one will feel we have changed. Slowly, without ever deciding to, we start performing a smaller, safer version of ourselves for both audiences.
This is where confidence begins to erode, not because we lack talent or courage, but because we have spent so many years managing other people’s interpretations of us that we forget who we were before we started.
To the woman living between two countries
If you are reading this as a woman who carries two places inside her, I want you to hear this clearly. Your generosity is not arrogance. Your honesty is not an attack. Your success is not a debt you owe to anyone. And you do not need a different name, a different accent or a different passport for your good intentions to be real.
You are allowed to be misunderstood and still remain yourself. You are allowed to pay the bill because it is right, to give feedback because you care, and to set a boundary because you are tired, without shrinking to make anyone else more comfortable. The people who are meant to walk beside you will learn to read you as you are, and the ones who cannot are showing you the limits of their lens, not the limits of your worth.
I have stopped wishing my name was Elizabeth. My name is Elif. It carries my father’s workshop, the Aegean light of Ayvalık, every language I have had to learn and every room I have had to walk into alone. It is not something to apologise for. It is the whole of me.
Perhaps the real question was never what would change if my name was Elizabeth. It is how much of Elif the world has been missing while it waited for her to sound like Elizabeth.
With love and honesty,
Elif Köse Founder and Editor, Confidence Magazine