Post by Aslı Naz Güzel Şamlı

The most interesting people I have met since moving to the US are almost impossible to describe in one sentence. The doctor who is also building a software company. The artist quietly doing serious research on the side. The lawyer who paints. The founder who used to teach literature... If you ask them what they do, they pause. The pause is not because they don't know. The pause is because they are scanning to see how much of themselves the room can hold. I have done this pause myself. I trained as a lawyer in Turkey, and that one line has never quite covered what I am working on now. For a long time I treated the pause as a problem, something to fix with a better elevator pitch. Lately I am not so sure. The pause is the honest part. The single sentence is the compressed part. The work most of us are actually doing, across countries, across disciplines, across versions of ourselves, does not compress well. That is not a personal failure. That is a feature of having a life that is more than one thing. The system will still ask for the single sentence. Visas, applications, introductions at events. You will need to answer. But it is worth knowing, before you do, that the sentence is the smallest version of you, not the truest one. The people worth knowing will always ask the second question. And mine obviously includes a goat on my back. Even I did not see that coming. #immigration #careerchange #O1visa #multihyphenate