Living Between Two Worlds: Finding Authenticity as an American Woman in Türkiye

The Reality of Living as an American Woman in Türkiye

I live in a constant state of flux these days.

With Thanksgiving approaching and Christmas quietly waiting its turn, I feel myself split—straddling two emotional hemispheres, trying to understand where I belong. What doeshome mean and where do I fit in all of this? Home is here now, but it’s not the same. This season makes me feel like a guest in both worlds. A tourist. A yabancı. I am an American woman in Türkiye.

During the holidays, I feel the distance most. I write more about this emotional contrast in Christmas in Türkiye, where quiet joys and deep longing often sit side by side.

Here in Türkiye, there is no Thanksgiving and I’ve had to create my own Thanksgiving in Türkiye. No familiar smells drifting from ovens. No strange, complicated comfort of old traditions rewrapped year after year. And yet, in the United States, I am no longer fully there either. I exist in the space between memory and absence. Life as an American woman in Türkiye exists somewhere between nostalgia and reinvention, between who I was and who I am becoming.

It is strange that I feel more at home during Ramadan and Bayram. Those holidays carry a rhythm and intimacy that I wrote about in Ramadan in Türkiye, where nights stretch long with community and tenderness.

Those seasons anchor me. The rhythm, the reverence, the quiet discipline of fasting and then the explosive warmth of celebration. It feels meaningful. Purposeful. Easter, in contrast, always felt like a borrowed ritual to me. I never longed to dye eggs or sit in church pews. Here, at least, the spiritual architecture makes sense in my bones.

Yet still — even though I’m an American woman in Türkiye, I feel most American in moments of rebellion — something I explored more deeply in my piece on life as a foreign woman in Türkiye.

When I want to move through the world as an autonomous woman. When I resist the quiet rules of what a “good wife” should be. When I bristle at the idea that a clean home and a warm meal should be the only visible proof of love. Those subtle expectations reveal so much about gender roles here, something I explore in Where Silence Lives, which captures the quiet pressures foreign women carry.

My husband is kind, and he reminds me often that all he wants is peace at home — but there are moments when I ache for the looseness we once had. The version of us that went out to dinner freely. The freedom to exist in a sundress with bare shoulders under a wide summer sky. The absence of explanation.

I feel most foreign in the smallest tasks. Daily logistics in Türkiye can be unexpectedly complex, as I wrote in Adapting to Life in Türkiye, where resourcefulness becomes its own survival skill.

Buying something simple. Asking for help. Navigating rules that feel invisible but immovable. A package I sent months ago still floats somewhere in Istanbul because I do not know the systems, the laws, the unspoken rituals of bureaucracy. I must wait. Ask. Hope. Sometimes feel like a child disguised as an adult.

Worst of all, I did not resist this.
It was his suggestion that I didn’t need Turkish.
That he would learn English.
That I could stay inside this soft dependence.

Now, after four years living as an American in Türkiye, I somehow regret this decision.

And somewhere, quietly, we did.

Weddings remain the most foreign landscape of all.

Even my own wedding felt like watching someone else’s life. There was no aisle. No vows. No language that held me. Just a word I understood only conceptually — evet.
Yes. Yes. Yes.

And what, truly, did I agree to?

Turkish weddings stretch on like stories told aloud for days. They are beautiful. They are ritualized. They are deeply cultural. And I sit inside them like a visitor, trying to understand the choreography of a life I chose.

And still — I grieve.

I grieve the woman I left behind.

Her independence. Her certainty. Her style. Her ability to walk through rooms without ever feeling like she was the anomaly. I grieve her fluency in her own world — knowing which plumber to call, how to open a bank account, where to find exactly what she needed without thinking twice.

I grieve the ease of sushi on a Tuesday night. The possibility of Mexican food when the soul was tired. The comfort of food that tasted like childhood and language that carried nuance without translation.

And yet.

There are days I feel a quiet, sacred gratitude.

I am grateful to have dismantled my life.
To have stripped it down to its barest architecture.
No car. No four-bedroom home. No closet full of options pretending to be identity. No endless social noise.

That transformation — from uncertainty to grounded presence — is something I began to recognize in The Art of Slow Living, where discomfort slowly turns into belonging.

To see what you are made of when nothing ornamental remains is the purest form of courage. To walk into your shadows and sit calmly beside them. To peel away softness and story and image, and meet the self that exists beneath comfort.

This is where authenticity lives.
This is where bravery becomes quiet.
This is where a soul is shaped not by wealth or freedom, but by honesty.

I do not know where I belong yet.

But I do know this:

There is something sacred about becoming.
Even when it hurts.
Even when it is lonely.

Especially when it is lonely.

Many people living abroad experience similar feelings of cultural displacement, something frequently explored by global research organizations like Pew Research Center.

Perhaps this is what it means to live as an American woman in Türkiye — to belong nowhere fully, yet learn to belong gently. Just soft echoes.