Between Worlds: How In-Betweenness Became My Path to Belonging

Photo Adolfo Félix

Opening Notes
This diary is about the tension and the blessing of living between worlds — and how that in-betweenness became the foundation of the Happiness 360 Podcast Network.

The Diary

For as long as I can remember, I have lived in the in-between. Harlem shaped me with its fire: the thrum of Sunday drums spilling out of churches, the cadence of voices on crowded sidewalks, the insistence on being seen in a world that tried to erase us. Harlem demanded presence. It taught me how to rise, how to carry defiance in my voice, how to let roots dig deep even when I longed to roam.

Paris offered something different. The cobblestones slowed my steps. Jazz lingered in the air like a benediction, carried forward from musicians who carved freedom into sound. The city gave me stillness, a pause from the constant scrutiny of race in America. Paris held elegance and reflection. Yet it also reminded me that I was a visitor, welcomed but never fully claimed.

For years, I believed belonging meant choosing. Harlem or Paris. English or French. Fire or stillness. To declare one was to amputate the other. And so, I lived fractured — two voices, two selves, never entirely at home.

When I began performing and sharing my work publicly, the fracture grew louder. Managers, producers, and consultants told me to pick a lane. Simplify. Brand myself in one language, one identity, one story people could digest. They called it strategy. I called it erasure. Every attempt to choose felt like cutting away a living part of me.

It took years — and countless detours — to see that the fracture was not my flaw but my gift. The clarity came when I stopped asking, Where do I belong? and began asking, How can I weave? Harlem’s fire and Paris’s stillness. The sharpness of English and the lyricism of French. The rhythm and the hush. They were never meant to compete. Together, they created wholeness.

That weaving has become the foundation of my work. It is why I tell stories in both English and French. Why my creative life resists being pressed into one box. And it is why I built the Happiness 360 Podcast Network — a place where contradictions are not hidden, but honored.

The network didn’t emerge from a marketing plan. It emerged from necessity. English cuts to the bone, delivering the truth with clarity. French cradles what resists direct translation, offering nuance, intimacy, and softness. Together they allow me to tell my story fully, without amputating one part of myself.

But this is bigger than me. The network is a bridge — for anyone who has ever felt torn between cultures, languages, or identities. It’s proof that you don’t have to choose. You can weave. You can belong by holding the whole of who you are, and by creating spaces where others can do the same.

This Becoming diary is about that journey: the long wrestle with fracture, the quiet realization that in-betweenness is abundance, and the work that grew out of it. What began as fire and stillness, Harlem and Paris, English and French, has become a home where my story — and maybe yours — can finally rest.

—Traciana

P.S. My most intimate reflections begin in Letters from Traciana. [Join here] to receive them first.