Two Passports

An identity crisis, conveniently laminated

I’m walking through customs, hand in pocket, and my fingers close around the thing we pretend is just a document.

A passport.

I pull it out and it’s red. Dutch. Not blue. American. Carrying two passports is its own small identity crisis, conveniently laminated so you can check on it at borders.

Every time I use the red one, I feel the same small friction — the quiet confrontation with identity not as a concept but as a physical object. Laminated. Approved. Stamped. Reduced.

I’m American by birth. I left when I was twenty. I’ve now spent more years outside the country than inside it, which is the kind of sentence that sounds tidier than it is. The formative years stay in your bones even when your memory loses the texture of them. I couldn’t tell you what my high school hallway smelled like. I could tell you exactly how I feel when I hear the national anthem, which is complicated.

Years ago, watching the Olympics, I rooted for America automatically. It wasn’t a decision. It was reflex. Flag equals me. Anthem equals us.

Somewhere along the way, that shifted.

Now I root for the person. The underdog. The one with something at stake. The one whose story moves me. My allegiance loosened from the borders and reattached to whoever happened to be in the frame.

I didn’t notice it happening. I just noticed, one Olympics, that I was cheering for a Kenyan runner against an American one and feeling nothing about it except go. Somewhere between twenty and now, my patriotism quietly filed for divorce and moved out, and I hadn’t even noticed it packing.

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I can name what I appreciate about America, even as my relationship to it has become complicated in the way all adult relationships become complicated. I value independence. Free thought. That electric idea of opportunity — the sense that you can start again, invent again, rebuild again. That there is always another door somewhere if you have the audacity to knock.

And in the Netherlands, I value something almost opposite, and just as important. A social contract. Thoughtfulness about the people around you. Calvinist restraint, which frustrates me and comforts me in the same breath, often on the same day, sometimes in the same meeting. It’s a culture that quietly reminds you: you are not the center. Your freedom is not more important than the room you share with others.

Two passports. Two philosophies.

One says become. One says belong.

I don’t fully belong to either anymore, which is either a loss or a kind of freedom, depending on the day and how the customs line is moving.

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What I feel, increasingly, is that I’m not trying to be more American or more Dutch. I’m trying to be more myself. Not the self stamped into a document. Not the self assigned by birthplace. Just the self I’m still building, in whichever country happens to be processing me that day.

When I look down at the red passport, I don’t see myself in the emblem. And instead of panicking, I feel something almost like relief.

Maybe the point isn’t to find yourself in a symbol.

Maybe the point is to stop asking a country to do it for you.