Expatriates Are Experts In Resilience

A few excerpts from interviews I've given and articles I've written:

Being an expatriate, you’re naturally a person in transition.

Your worst days can leave you feeling unmoored and alienated. Your best days bring a sense of your agile nature and the qualities that make you unique from the people who surround you and the people back home.

Working toward an understanding of what it will take for you to feel your best in your environment I think is extremely worthwhile. Your answers perfectly define you and the more closely they are incorporated into your business plans the better chance you have of career success abroad.

After five years in Malaysia and 8.5 in Turkey, I've made the limbo state of expatriatism (not belonging to your surroundings but having to navigate them in culturally appropriate ways AND honor the truth of who you are at the same time) a strength instead of a weakness.

With my career disrupted by international relocations and watching the traditional media business being disrupted by digital and social media, my particular m.o. has evolved into gate jumping. That’s a combination of reaction to obstacles in my environments, and a commitment to not be hindered by “what is”.

Gate jumping can work for expats of all kinds.

Here’s how I do it: Fearlessly operating without borders instead of accepting my off-the-grid, situation-mismatch as a paralyzing disadvantage.

Time zones, language barriers, geographical distances, old-school thinking and collapse in my industries of media and entertainment, these things don't stop me.

Being an early adopter of Twitter, I use it for continuing education like virtually attending conferences and entering high level discussions in my topics of interest, to networking and meeting my peers around the world.

One of the reasons I founded GlobalNiche.net is that I have noticed that the majority of expats disappear when they go abroad rather than come to local and international prominence through their expat lives as I have done.

Even fewer women expats accomplish this in Muslim countries or have managed to raise the voices of multiple other women in a country known for its censorship. See the details of this particular adventure in my piece The Accidental Anthologist.

I don't think any of this is easy to achieve. But I do think it's integral to surviving, and thriving.

+++

Linda Janssen has written a book on this topic called The Emotionally Resilient Expat. Jo Parfitt's Summertime Publishing is releasing it in 2013.

Cleopatra For A Day: Expat Beauty & Fashion

I’m still assimilating everything — and everywhere — I’ve experienced in terms of fashion and beauty, but here are a few thoughts.

This appeared in The Displaced Nation, March 19, 2012.

Continuing our feature, “Cleopatra for a Day,” we turn to Anastasia Ashman, an American whose love of the exotic led her to Southeast Asia (Malaysia) and Istanbul, Turkey to live (she also found a Turkish husband en route!). Having just moved back home to California, Ashman opens her little black book and spills the fashion and beauty secrets she has collected over three decades of pursuing a nomadic life.

BEAUTY STAPLES

Like Cleopatra, I’m into medicinal unguents and aromatic oils. My staples are lavender and tea tree oil for the tropical face rot you can get in hot, humid places — and for all other kinds of skin complaints, stress, headaches, jet lag, you name it — and Argan oil for skin dryness. I take them everywhere. I also spray lavender and sandalwood on my sheets.

When living in Southeast Asia I liked nutmeg oil to ward off mosquitoes. (I know that’s not beauty per se but bug-bitten is not an attractive look, and it’s just so heavenly smelling too, I suppose you can slather it on your legs and arms for no reason at all.)

I didn’t even have to go to Africa to become dependent on shea butter for lips and hands, and I like a big block of cocoa butter from the Egyptian Bazaar in Istanbul for après sun and gym smoothing — less greasy than shea butter, which I usually use at night.

I’m not really into branded products. When you move around it’s hard to keep stocking your favorite products and I find companies are always discontinuing the things I like so I’ve become mostly brand agnostic.

I just moved from Istanbul to San Francisco, and I got rid of almost everything I owned so I’m seeing what basics I can live with. Because to me, basics that do a wonderful, multifaceted job are the definition of luxury. You’ve got to figure out what those basics are for you.

Oh, and when I am in Paris, I buy perfume. Loved this tiny place in Le Marais that created scents from the plants on the island of Sardinia. And wouldn’t you know it, the second time I went they’d gone out of business. Crushing.

My favorite perfume maker in Paris at the moment — very intriguing perspective, lots of peppery notes and almost nicotiney pungencies — is L’Artisan Parfumeur. I’ve got my eye on their Fou d’Absinthe.

In another life, past or present, I know I was involved with perfume…

BEAUTY TREATMENTS

Believe Cleopatra would drink them dissolved in vinegar? In Malaysia I used to get capsules of crushed pearls from a Chinese herbalist down the street from my house — apparently they’re good for a creamy-textured skin.

I’ll take a facial in any country. I like Balinese aromatic oil massages when I can get them, too, and will take a bath filled with flowers if I’ve got a view of the jungle. Haven’t yet had my chance to do a buttermilk bath. I also do mud baths and hot springs where ever they’re offered, in volcanic areas of the world.

Another indispensable: the Turkish hamam. It’s really great for detoxification, relaxation and exfoliation. When living in Istanbul, I’d go at least once a season, and more often in the summer. It’s great to do with a clutch of friends. You draw out the poaching experience by socializing in the steamy room on heated marble benches, and take turns having your kese (scrub down) with a rough goat-hair mitt. You hire a woman who specializes in these scrubs, and then she massages you with a soapy air-filled cotton bag, and rinses you off like a mother cat washes her kitten.

Soap gets in the eyes, yes.

I own all the implements now, including hand-crocheted washcloths made with silverized cotton, knitted mitts, oil and laurel oil soaps, copper hamam bowls (for rinsing), linen pestemal (wraps or towels), and round pumice stones. (For haman supplies, try Dervis.com.)

DENTAL CARE

I’ve had dental work done in Malaysia and Turkey and was very satisfied with the level of care and the quality and modernity of the equipment and techniques. I got used to state-of-the-science under-the-gum-line laser cleanings in Malaysia (where my Taiwanese dentist was also an acupuncturist) and worry now that I am back to regular old ineffective cleanings. I’ve had horrific experiences in New York, by the way, so don’t see the USA as a place with better oral care standards.

In general, I like overkill when it comes to my teeth. I’ll see oral surgeons rather than dentists, and have my cleanings from dentists rather than oral hygienists.

ENHANCEMENTS

Turkey apparently has a lot of plastic surgery, as well as Lasik eye surgery. One thing to consider about cosmetic procedures is the local aesthetic and if it’s right for you. I didn’t appreciate the robot-like style of eyebrow shaping in Istanbul (with a squared-off center edge) — so I’d be extra wary of anything permanent!

HAIR

I’ve dyed my hair many colors — from black cherry in Asia to red to blonde in Turkey — and had it styled into ringlets and piled up like a princess and blown straight like an Afghan hound. That last one doesn’t work with my fine hair, and doing this style before an event on the Bosphorus would make it spring into a cotton candy-like formation before I’d had my first hors d’oeuvre.

I’ve had my hair cut by people who don’t know at all how to handle curly hair. That’s pretty daring.

I looked like a fluff ball for most of my time in Asia, because I tried to solve the heat and humidity problem with short hair and got tired of loading it up with products meant for thick straight Asian hair.

Now that I’ve relocated to San Francisco (which, even though it’s close to my hometown of Berkeley where I haven’t lived in 30 years, I still consider “a foreign country”), I’m having my hair cut by a gardener, who trims it dry, like a hedge. Having my hair cut by an untrained person with whatever scissors he can find is also pretty daring!

FASHION

On the fashion front, I have an addiction to pashmina-like shawls from Koza Han, the silk market in Bursa, the old capital of the Ottoman empire and a Silk Road stop. I can keep wearing them for years.

I also have a small collection of custom-made silk kebayas from Malaysia, the long, fitted jacket over a long sarong skirt on brightly hand-drawn and printed batik, which I pull out when I have to go to a State dinner and the dress code is formal/national dress. (It’s only happened once, at Malacañan Palace, in Manila!)

I have one very tightly fitting kebaya jacket that is laser-cut velvet in a midnight blue which I do not wear enough. Thanks for reminding me. I may have to take out the too-stiff shoulder pads.

LINGERIE

I like state-of-the-art stuff that does more than one thing at once and find most places sell very backward underthings that are more about how they look than how they fit, feel, or perform. Nonsense padded bras, bumpy lace, and stuff that is low on performance and high on things I don’t care about.

I got an exercise racerback bra at a Turkish shop and had to throw it away it was so scratchy and poorly performing. No wicking of sweat, no staying put, no motion control. But it had silver glittery thread — and (unnecessary) padding!

JEWELRY

I like most of the jewelry I’ve acquired abroad and am grateful to receive it as gifts, too. All of my pieces have some kind of story — and some attitude, too.

From Turkey: Evil-eye nazar boncuğu pieces in glass and porcelain; silk-stuffed caftan pendants from the Istanbul designer Shibu; Ottoman-style enameled pieces; and an opalized Hand of Fatima on an impossibly fine gold chain. This last piece is what all the stylish women in Istanbul are wearing at the moment.

From China: White pearls from Beijing, pink from Shanghai and purple from Shenyang.

From Malaysia: I got an tiny tin ingot in the shape of a turtle in Malacca, which I was told once served as currency in the Chinese community. I had it mounted in a gold setting and wear it from a thick satin choker.

From Holland: A recent acquisition from Amsterdam are gold and silver leather Lapland bracelets with hand-twinned pewter and silver thread and reindeer horn closures. They’re exquisite and rugged at the same time.

WEARING RIGHT NOW

Today’s a rainy day of errands so I’m wearing a fluffy, black cowl-necked sweater with exaggerated sleeves, brown heathered slacks, and black ankle boots. They’re all from New York, which is where I’ve done the most shopping in recent years.

My earrings are diamond and platinum pendants from Chicago in the 1940s, a gift from my grandmother.

I’ve also got on my platinum wedding and engagement rings. They’re from Mimi So in New York.

DAILY FASHION FIXES

I liked FashionTV in Turkey, which was owned by Demet Sabanci Cetindogan, the businesswoman who sponsored my Expat Harem book tour across America in 2006.

The segment of Turkish society interested in fashion is very fashion forward. I enjoyed being able to watch the runway shows and catch interviews with the designers.

If I could draw and sew I’d make all my own clothes but I am weak in these areas. In another life, when I get a thicker skin for the fashion world’s unpleasantries, I’ll devote myself to learning these things and have a career in fashion design.

STREET STYLE

In Istanbul, Nişantaşi is somewhere you’d see some real fashion victims limping along in their heels on the cobblestones and Istiklal Caddesi, the pedestrian boulevard in Beyoğlu, would be a place to see a million different looks from grungy college kids to young men on the prowl, with their too-long, pointy-toed shoes.

TOP BEAUTY/STYLE LESSONS FROM TRAVELS

In fact, I’m still assimilating everything — and everywhere — I’ve experienced in terms of fashion and beauty, but here are a few thoughts:

1) Layering: I learned from Turkish women to layer your jewelry and wear a ton of things at the same time. Coco Chanel would have a heart attack! But the idea is not to wear earrings, necklace, bracelet and rings all at once, but lots of necklaces or lots of bracelets or lots of rings at the same time.

2) Jewelry as beach accessory: During the summer Turkish wear lots of ropy beaded things on their wrists during a day at the beach — nothing too valuable (it’s the beach!) but attractive nonetheless. Jewelry stands feeding this seasonal obsession crop up at all the fashionable beach spots. Dangly charms and evil eyes and little golden figures on leather and paper ropes.

3) A little bling never hurts: I’ve also been influenced by the flashiness of Turkish culture, and actually own a BCBG track suit with sequined logos on it. This is the kind of thing my Turkish family and I would all wear on a plane or road trip. Comfortable and sporty, but not entirely unaware of being in public (and not at the gym). Coming from dressed-down Northern California, it was difficult to get used to being surrounded by glitzy branded tennis shoes and people wearing watches as jewelry, but I hope I’ve been able to take some of the better innovations away with me. I know I’m more likely to wear a glittery eye shadow now that I’ve lived in the Near East.

4) The need for sun protection: It was a shock to go from bronzed Los Angeles to can’t-get-any-paler Asia and then to the bronzed Mediterranean. In Asia I arrived with sun damage and then had lots of people helping me to fix it — I even used a parasol there. Then in Turkey everyone thought I was inexplicably pale and I let my sun protection regimen slip a bit. I’m back on the daily sunblock.

5) What colors to wear: I also used to get whiplash from trips back and forth between California and Southeast Asia in terms of color in clothing. In Malaysia the colors were vivid jewel tones — for the Malays and the Tamils especially. The louder the print, the better. Around the same time I was living in that part of the world, I witnessed a scuffle between shoppers at C.P. Shades in my hometown Berkeley, fighting over velvet granny skirts in moss, and mildew and wet cement colors. That kind of disconnect wreaks havoc on your wardrobe, and your sense of what looks good. Right now I’m trying to incorporate bright colors into my neutral urges. I’m still working it out.

Playing Big With Your Global Niche: Tara Sophia Mohr

Building your global niche -- the place you belong and operate to your true potential -- is about being both as unique and as big as you can be. This week Global Niche invites you to a live, interactive, online conversation with writer, coach and personal growth teacher Tara Sophia Mohr.

Join us in our Linqto* web room on Friday, January 13th at 10am ***Pacific Time*** [be sure to convert to your local time] to talk about optimizing who and where you are.

Tara Mohr will share the tactical skills she teaches in her upcoming Playing Big program [http://bit.ly/zeasyU] which we can all use to hone our specialties and deepen/broaden our impact in the world.

Have a question for Tara? Post it at our LinkedIn Playing Big discussion here: http://lnkd.in/4JmGgS

If you can't make it to the call, we'll release the recording soon after.

* Instructions for entering the Linqto space - go to http://www.linqto.com/rooms/taraagacayaklive test web cam and mic, if you wish to ask questions on camera enter the room enter a screen name

Here's a calendar of our previous and upcoming events: http://www.globalniche.net/conversations/

Hosting Personal Growth Teacher Tara Sophia Mohr In A Live, Interactive, Online Conversation

This week at GlobalNiche we'll be talking with Tara Sophia on the live web video app Linqto. Participants can ask questions during the call, either on-camera or by typing them into the Linqto chat room while we talk.  This will be my firstLinqto call. Tara Mohr will share the tactical skills she teaches in her upcoming Playing Big program [http://bit.ly/zeasyU] which we can all use to hone our specialties and deepen/broaden our impact in the world.

...excited to get the GlobalNiche year started with such an inspiring topic and expert. I met Tara Sophia in person last month for the first time now that we're in the same city (San Francisco) and she's got a great presence: focused, and serene, and so clear.

What I like most about Tara Sophia is that she balances a desire for results with a gentle understanding of why we might not be getting those results yet. She knows what it's going to take to get there, to "play big". She cracks me up, too. This is the woman who landed a book segment on the Today Show before she even had a book to sell.

Feting the Global Women's Leadership Network Graduates

Thanks to Tanya Monsef Bunger for inviting me to be among her international guests at the University of Santa Clara gala for Global Women's Leadership Network at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel, Palo Alto. Among those pictured: Pratima Rao, Shawn Bunger, Sheila Tost, Sigrid Monsef, Sanja Pesich, Bernadette Frager, Dahlia Krausse, Leslie Robidoux.

Thought Leadership Leads To Career Independence

A case study in the building of a thought leadership platform by Michael Margolis. I personally have enjoyed watching Michael Margolis grow his thought leadership platform for the past year since I took part in his REINVENTION SUMMIT last November.

"McGyverish", as Linda Janssen referred in the GlobalNiche LinkedIn group to Margolis's approach of leveling up internally, certainly describes the pioneering, recombinant approach we all are taking by using the practices and tools at hand, and incorporating new ones being introduced every day. Staying flexible, and iterating.

The Global Niche Muse: Out Of Place And Mistress Of Her Domain

Take a plunge into metaphor with us as we explore the meaning behind a graphic muse you'll recognize from Dialogue2010 Mapping the Hybrid Life podcast and the Hybrid Ambassadors blog-ring. At GlobalNiche.net we love this image -- part photograph, part 2nd generation photocopy, and part Photoshop -- a whimsical pioneer woman peering out from the center of her own personal compass point. We've incorporated her into the logo for our new work-life initiative, and below we discover exactly how she embodies creative enterprise for the global soul.

(You can see this story of how I made our mystery woman in my isolated Kuala Lumpur office in 1998, where she comes from, what she's survived -- and also, circumstantially, why she's so well-coiffed -- in the proper Tweet-and-commentary format at Storify.com)

• I spotted this whimsical woman on a fading coiffeur signboard in Sarawak, Borneo

Photography is a now-not-so-secret love of mine, and it was a saving grace of my first long-term expat stint in Southeast Asia. Seeing everything with a photographer's eye made my surroundings endlessly fascinating and ripe with opportunity, no matter what else was happening or how I was feeling. It was also a key to orienting myself, following leads, making connections between the past and the present cultures.

The quickly-disappearing antique commercial signboards of the Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) were a particular favorite of mine. You can imagine when I landed in the East Malaysia state of Sarawak I went straight to the old town to see the remnants of what establishments had once flourished there.

Although the inevitable lag of fashion around the world might be at work here, from her hairstyle I guess the sign went up in the 1930s-40s.

• the compass superimposed over her eye (self-image, get it?) is from an around-the-world cruise line ad

...and with her eye on the world, the image represents her unique perspective.

• the round-the-globe ad was published during the Golden Age of Travel. I found it in the National Archives of Malaysia

I was an absolute microfiche *bandit* at the National Archive....here you can see some of the Straits Settlements newspaper gossip items and police blotters I captured. Hilarious, tragic, telling stuff no matter what the subject (whether it was Somerset Maugham's buttoned-down planters going nuts/running amok, or infectious diseases being passed around by the Chinese laundry services, or opium dens being fined for admitting ladies, the place was off-the-hook).

The steamer-trunks-and-servants Golden Age of travel was also an interest piqued by the region, and I explored it for a web venture Flaming East.

• in land of White Rajas (Conrad's early heartofdarkness?), she seemed 1) out of place 2) possibly mistress of her domain

• The White Rajahs were a dynasty of Brits who ruled Sarawak for about a hundred years during the mid-19th-20th century.

Joseph Conrad, author of the novel Heart of Darkness, had earlier written Lord Jim, which may have been based in part on the pirate-filled sea experiences of the first White Rajah James Brooke.

To that setting of personal, mini-empire building, add the coiffed nature of this woman and you get someone who seems like she's holding it together somehow. She's managing to take care of herself.

At GlobalNiche.net we're not all about personal grooming -- nor are we conquering anything except perhaps our situations (setting up our own private rajs?).

...but this specific and historical background was swirling around the image of the coiffed lady when I snapped it as a displaced Western woman in the tropics myself. To me, the context was captured along with the image.

Being yourself *and* at home in a place very different than what you've known or been prepared for -- out of place, and mistress of our domain -- that's the GlobalNiche combo!

• GlobalNiche's muse is a woman in the wild following her personal compass where ever around the world it might take her

And in conclusion...just as the Golden Age of Travel revolutionized the possibilities of exploring the world with confidence

at GlobalNiche.net we're operating globally with the ease of digital nomadism and with the precision of a unique sense of who we are

...suddenly our incidental heroine is thoroughly modern, and appropriate for today's unbounded age.

• our muse is a #pioneer centered by her personal compass in an age when traveling with speed/style/grace is perfected

Tell us what you see in the wild-but-coiffed woman of Borneo. What name would you give her? (I think we're going to need one!)

Suspended Between Multiple Worlds -- Challenged By Culture, Geography, Language or Time Zone? What I Did About It.

Do you ever feel suspended between multiple worlds -- challenged in your pursuits and interests by culture, geography, language or time zone? Welcome to the club. In fact, after fourteen years of expatriatism and through my cultural identity work as a writer/producer I’ve come to see this psychic limbo state about who we are and where we belong -- familiar to people with transglobal lives and culturally hybrid lifestyles -- as our secret weapon.

To start at the beginning, we’re all born global citizens even if that knowledge gets trained out of us. As we mature, a global identity seems nebulous, and ungrounded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation. Our schoolmates, colleagues, neighbors.

There’s a problem with concrete, though. It cracks over time and in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

I’d even venture to say that ‘our people’ today are not who they used to be. We’re unbounded by the communities in our physical midst. Now we can find inspiring new kinship in interest and outlook.

Expats and international types have more reasons than most to find a way to operate independently of where we happen to be physically.

With today's economic uncertainties no matter who or where we are, we all have to embrace an enterprising view of ourselves -- a way to operate unlimited by the options directly surrounding us.

With recent advances in virtual technologies like mobile devices and the social web, we have tools at our disposal to help us live a globally unbounded life.

Now we don’t have to be a tech expert or social media guru to build a micro-yet-global base of operations with a professional web platform and virtual network for continuing education, professional development, and a close-knit but world-flung set of friends. We can be digital world citizens and achieve a cutting-edge state of being -- that is, what I call ‘psychic location independence’.

I coined the concept of a global niche -- defined as a ‘psychic solution to your global identity crisis’-- at expat+HAREM, the online community of global citizens, identity adventurers and intentional travelers I founded in 2009. The group blog was inspired by the global community that gathered around Tales from the Expat Harem, an anthology by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey that I coedited in 2005 with fellow Istanbul resident Jennifer Gokmen.

Expatharem.com was also informed by the idea of an ‘expat harem’ itself, where all the writers in the book and the readers drawn to them are cultural peers in a virtual realm.

My partner Tara Agacayak, a creative enterprise consultant from Silicon Valley who’s spent the past 10 years in Turkey, and I launched this new work-life initiative here at GlobalNiche.net. We’re applying the innovations we've been exploring in the past few years in our professional communities of creative entrepreneurs and social media proponents along with our expat experiences. We've realized that a robust online presence that helps us reach our offline goals is the most important independent survival skill of international people.

Name Changes of My LinkedIn Group Track With Its Evolution. Social Media Is A Given. And We're All Creative Entrepreneurs.

When Tara Agacayak and I started our LinkedIn group in 2009 we called it Creative Entrepreneurs and Social Media. We wanted a place to discuss what we were learning about using social media to build our professional platforms. Within six months it became apparent our use of social media had naturally coalesced into our creative enterprise goals. So we dropped it from our name -- social media is not a distinguishing factor, it’s a given now!

Today, as we’ve all become much more savvy in our pro use of the social web while building our platforms we think it’s time to take this group to the next level.

Soon we’ll be changing the name of this group to Global Niche to reflect the fact we are all builders of our own micro-yet-global base of operation. We look forward to having more conversations here about what it means to be (and build!) a global microbrand as a creative entrepreneur.

Please swing by http://globalniche.net to learn more about this life-work initiative for indie pros, mobile progressives and cultural creatives.

We’re looking forward to evolving with you!

My Global Niche: An Interview With Today's Zaman Newspaper

American reporter in Turkey Brooks Emerson asked me about the foreign edge, and the challenges of finding my niche in Turkey for his series on expat success stories in national English-language newspaper Today's Zaman. In the far-ranging interview, Emerson asks me what the initial impetus for my success as an expat was, and how I've evolved.

No surprise to those who know me, foreign language adoption has not played much of a role -- once I realized that taking business meetings and doing live television interviews in Turkish literally was rendering me mute! But mentoring in all realms of my personal and professional life has been a "secret weapon" in the creative entrepreneurship of self that I aim to practice.

Emerson asks me how the environment affects the outcome of an expat's endeavors. I tell him how sense of place can inspire a sense of self.

"Anastasia says that she has always been attracted to places with an amalgamation of people and cultures. However, the biggest pull is “the idea of crossroads … like Rome, where [she] studied in college … and now here on the Bosporus,” where she senses a positive energy and vibration for self-discovery and reinvention.

"Anastasia believes that working and living abroad is an excellent way to discover new self-potential."

Read Emerson's entire July 2011 interview "The global niche of Anastasia Ashman" online.

Expat Images: Unrecognizable Vs. Iconic

On my first serious expat stint, Southeast Asia in the ‘90s, I achieved a state of photographic oblivion. When I set out from Los Angeles I was already solidly unemployed, unproductive, and unmotivated. I had a capricious romance to see me through.

In Asia, life losses piled up: heirlooms ransacked at the container yard, the cruel theft of a puppy, the unfathomable demise of my best friend.

I did not write about any of these things. Too much shock, no support. Turns out capricious romance isn’t the best fallback in a crisis.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL BARRIERS PREVENTED ME FROM BONDING WITH THE CHINESE, MALAYS, TAMILS AND THAIS AROUND ME. My reactions were miscalibrated: I laughed when introduced to a person with the name of a celebrated American boxer -- a common moniker in Malaysia -- and took offense at the quickly-retracted handshake of a traditional Malay greeting. I expected dinner party banter at gatherings that instead seemed to focus on the scarfing of food in silence.

Soon enough I was as unrecognizable as my new world.

My own body was erasing me. A spongy, knee-less Southern Italian genetic inheritance asserted itself with the help of a greasy local diet while my hair frizzed mercilessly in the tropical air.

Friends who knew me during cosmopolitan past lives in New York, California, and Italy wouldn’t identify me as the 30-pounds heavier creature with the ill-fitting clothes and unschooled haircut photographed in jungles and palaces.

Uprooted from my milieu, in a harsh climate and surrounded by perpetual strangers, I was desperate to locate comfort whatever the cost.

My Asia photographs are stowed, an expat adventure distressing to recall, impossible to frame. Yet, scraping bottom (especially on the far side of the world) has a benefit. It’s easy to see which way is up.

My 12-time zone couch surf back to New York was like a Phoenix’s ascent from the ashes

RECENTLY I'VE BEEN PICTURED MONSTROUS AGAIN. Breathe easy: happily married, in possession of a hard won sense of self. This particular snapshot of expat life is a mantle piece pride. There I am in 2005 commandeering the lens, the microphone, the printing press in Istanbul as Turkish newspapers and television discuss my expat literature collection by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey. Tales not universally known, many writers never before published. All of them minority voices in a Muslim nation with a reputation for censorship.

The celebrity-studded book launch is a blur, except for my unauthorly leather pants and shiny rock star coiffure -- those are in fine focus in my mind’s eye! I haven’t often been so polished before or since, nor managed to squeeze into the lambskin trousers, but no matter.

As a coiner of the concept of the Expat Harem virtual community -- feminine storytellers making sense of life’s evolutions through the filter of another culture -- in a flash I became iconic.

A positive image of an expat to others, and to myself.

THE FLEETING, PICTURESQUE MOMENT CAPTURES AN ENDURING TRUTH ABOUT MY EXPATRIATISM. In a wide world of strangers I’ve finally found my perpetual peers, and a theoretical home for both my literary career and my life abroad.

Now I have a way to nurture and sustain my most valuable expatriate possession -- my sense of self -- no matter where I am, or what heights or depths I face.

What image captures you at your most unrecognizable  -- and your most iconic? What was happening in your life in that moment? +++++ This post originally appeared in Amanda van Mulligen's blogseries "Expat Images"

At Home In The Body

Getting out of our head is a fab way to both calm the inner [com]motion, slow down that ultraprecious commodity *time*, and get out into the world...who knew!? +++++ AT expat+HAREM, and AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

An American erotica artist in Germany Tatiana von Tauber confesses she paints in the nude to get back in touch with her most life-loving senses when expat circumstance (3 kids in a hotel room for a month, anyone?) overwhelms her.

If "the body is the real and final home" as writer Toni Morrison says, a whole troupe of Third Culture Kids find a new sense of belonging when they throw their global souls into this multidisciplinary dance performance. Dancing their way home. Lucky people in Toronto can catch choreographer Alaine Handa's "Chameleon" at the Fringe Festival this month.

And finally, at Psychology Today, creativity consultant and yoga proponent Jeffrey Davis illuminates why feeling at home in the body makes us flexible and inventive, focused and calm, vital and connected to our emotions.

Moving our bodies makes us all the ways we hope to be alive in the world.

It helps us process where we've been, who we are, when and why we were lost, where we're going now. And why we love it. +++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

So many of us are mobile, or in personal or professional transition. How do you make sense of movement and change? How do you retain the assets you've established?

Tell us what question you want to ask a personal branding expert. If I hear from enough of you I'll make a webinar to get you the answers!

Measuring Social Media Influence: Klout & Empire Avenue

In the GlobalNiche LinkedIn group, designer and writer Catherine Salter Bayar shared this piece from the New York Times -- "Got Twitter? What's Your Influence Score"  -- and asked the group if we've looked at Klout. I said that I took a look this week (actually checked out Klout a while back -- so now I have an OG badge there....as far as I know "OG" stands for "original gangster" so I'm not sure what they could possibly mean by it, ha)

There are strangenesses, like their claim I am influenced by @GigaOm, which is an account I don't even follow.

Most interesting to me is the STYLE matrix: Today I'm a "broadcaster", yesterday I was a "specialist" and I'd like to be a "tastemaker" like @brainpicker. The change in my score (today is 62) must be due to some large retweets I got today on topics other than the narrow ones they ascribe to me). What models do you aspire to on Twitter and where are they in the matrix of your followed accounts?

Writer and artist Rose Deniz said, "My Klout score is erratic, too, so I don't put a lot of emphasis on it in terms of influence, and I do notice that it's fluid based on your activity level - how sensitive it is to daily fluxes, I don't know."

"I've found Empire Avenue to be a better indicator (and more interesting) - it just tracks more stuff," responded global marketing strategist Kirsten Weiss.

"I think any sort of measurement system is bound to be full of flaws," said social media educator Charlene Kingston.

"At first glance, not sure I love Empire Avenue's verbiage - banking terms repel more than attract me," said Catherine Bayar.

On The Advisory Board For Turkish Women International Network

I'm pleased to be on the advisory board of Turkish WIN, a global networking platform for women with family, cultural or professional ties to Turkey with regular speaking events -- a cross between TED and A SMALL WORLD. Featured here with founder Melek Pulatkonak and my fellow TRWIN speakers at KAGIDER  (Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey) headquarters, Istanbul, June 2011, AKTUEL magazine. Nakiye Boyaciller next to me is the dean of Sabanci University's business school, and Sedef Koktenturk on the far right is a Turkish Olympian in the sport of sailing.

Being Global Gives Writers Unique Voices

The writer and cultural curator Rose Deniz asked us what happens to our writing when worlds and languages collide.

Our language choice and vernacular will never be the same.

Even if I don't use Turkish words, the syntax is bound to slip in... like "make shopping" instead of "go shopping", and "arrive to" instead of "arrive at or in".

I know my adoption of the Malaysian "air-con" replaced the American "A/C" and remains hard to shake more than a decade since I lived there.

For globalist writers, like Rose and me and so many of the Expat Harem bloggers, I can only think it adds to the unique definition of our voice.

Theory Into Practice

Hope you're enjoying the nature in your part of the world, and as you make your mid-year plans, you're using the playful travel buzzwords bursting out all over: (palidays! set-jetting! buddymoons! frightseeing!) +++++ AT expat+HAREM

Those April showers have us blooming too. We've got a new video section at the site, with some golden oldies like the Expat Harem editors on NBC's Today Show with Matt Lauer, a steamy talk with Martin Anthony on The Crossroads, and recent material like my "Evolution of a global niche" slideshow (about how to use an identity crisis to your advantage!) and a talk at Microsoft Turkey for Turkish Women's International Network last month.*

Hybrid life coach Amna Ahmad shows us how to "decolonize your inner world" with a simple writing exercise, while Rose Deniz grapples with a unique lingo as she leaves her native tongue behind. Sezin Koehler calls for essays about Third Culture retirement issues -- a pressing concern for Baby Boomers and adult-onset Third Culture types like many of us.

+++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We're intrigued by the concept of Trunk, a global culture magazine "in the spirit of a Hemingway novel" which proclaims "there are no foreign lands", but we can really use the real-life logistics of expat women packed into a just-released book from ExpatWomen.com (download a sample here). Check out author Andrea Martin's $5,000 launch lottery too.

+++++ *BTW, these fresh videos offer a sneak peek into expat+HAREM's newest initiative -- Globalniche.net --  a private and practical membership community to learn exactly how to operate professionally and personally independent of traditional limitations. Putting theory into practice. Join us on Facebook and Twitter!

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

What would you want to learn in our new educational community? Which expert do you want to hear from? Your votes will determine the topic of our first (complimentary) webinar...coming soon!

Click here to share your most burning question.

+++++

Perennially yours,

+++++ MISS LAST MONTH? Check out April's Upheavals +++++

Genotype Detectives. Cultural Creatives. Expats In Hollywood.

• The mysterious case of the introverted extrovert -- a phenomenon I too discovered in myself while making the Expat Harem anthology, in The Accidental Anthologist -- here written about by Karen Nicole Costa, the self-described "queen of the Irish goodbye." (That means leaving without any closing niceties.)

• Why use social media? To discover who you really are, writes content strategist Dan Blank at We Grow Media. "When you start sharing more openly for all the world to see, outside of the social construct that surrounds you in your daily life, you share something that is uniquely you." (Here at expat+HAREM we wrote about the self-actualization of social media, especially for the far-flung and previously invisible.)

• The chronic "American smile does not mean anything," claims a Russian writer, who says Russians also feel uncomfortable with the smiley-ness of Thais, Chinese and Japanese. Reminds us of Scary Azeri's post for us about the stern facial expressions of Eastern Europeans.

• Wonder about your genotype? Last week was "World DNA Day" (who knew?), and expat+HAREM pal Dr. Nassim Assefi draws our attention to 23andMe, which will analyze your personal genetic info for health and ancestry purposes. Not only will you get monthly updates on DNA, and predictions for disease risk, drug response and other conditions, the report will help connect you to relatives and map your heritage. $99 at the moment, used to be thousands!

• Cultural creatives carry the cultural change in society. The (R)evolution: the first international movie about (200 million!) cultural creatives pulls together the threads of their philosophies and their work, which are part of "a quiet but necessary revolution taking place in today's culture." Watch the trailer, donate or help promote to view the whole film. Connect with the cultural creative community on Facebook and Twitter.

• Always happy to see an expat writer make good! Journalist Alan Paul's memoir Big in China: My Unlikely Adventure Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Reinventing Myself in Beijing scheduled to get the Hollywood treatment. I was pleased to be featured alongside Alan in Chantal Panozzo's Writer Abroad interview series last year...

• "Travel back in time, and around the world": This travel film archive takes you to bygone eras in faraway lands.

Comment below on any of the above, we're on the same page now...

Speaking About Global Niche At Turkish Women's International Network, Microsoft

Spoke today at Turkish WIN about the evolution of a global niche (my own, and the educational community I'm now developing). Microsoft headquarters, Istanbul. View my slideshow "The Evolution Of A Global Niche" here. I joined four other "accomplished dreamers" speaking at this inaugural Istanbul event produced by Melek Pulatkonak, the founder of Turkish WIN.

How To Use An Identity Crisis To Your Advantage

What comes after cultural disenfranchisement?

What comes after Expat Harem, the book?

What comes after expat+HAREM, the community site?

This slideshow charts the evolution of Globalniche.net (or, how to use an identity crisis to your advantage). Below is the script of my accompanying talk The Evolution of A GlobalNiche, delivered at Turkish Women's International Network, Microsoft Headquarters, Istanbul

EVOLUTION

DREAM of belonging how PLAYING with cultural identity has helped me ACHIEVE new sense of myself, personally and pro

CONCEPT & COMMUNITY we can all can use to be successful.

MAP

FB contacts. Where in the world do I belong?

Dream of belonging. Not just fitting in. But being in the right place with the right people. Place to lead your ideal lifestyle, chosen livelihood? Work you love to do so much it’s play?

For ppl who dream of life/community beyond what surrounds u now.

Story begins. Southeast Asia. Disenfranchised experience. lost my voice. Writer but I could not make myself understood. I didn’t understand what was going on around me.

What saved me: play. Pasttimes that put me into context. Taught me about the place. Historical travelogue. Acting in a period film. Drawn to crossroads, places where time meshes, opposites collide and cultures fuse.

EXPAT HAREM

Turkey 2003. Asian complaint travelogue. Snake infested island! Pirate-filled waters! No metaphors, really happened.

Turkey kidnapped me instead - metaphor. Theoretical home with the Expat Harem anthology. Inspired by the foreign women in sultan harem, liminal state of TR.

Showed how we can be embedded in a place, yet forever alien. Survive, but thrive in limbo. Also my character, like working alone at home, in collab with others. Found historical counterparts, also cultural peers. 100 women in 14 nations answered call for subs. 100s more on book tours. No longer alone in my limbo, even if American publishers suspected I was. worried book’s nonexistent audience, 15 New York publishing houses passed before sold. proved wrong. Thanks to Turks Turkophiles, expats, travelers, women writers, Near Eastern studies types -- people like you.

EXPANDING

EH called together virtual community but nowhere to meet. 2yrs ago: group blog to address readers and see what was beyond the book.

Expand circle. not just woman expat writer in Turkey. Expats everywhere. Global nomads, multicultural types. Immigrants, intentional travelers. Men, even! Anyone in cultural limbo.

New social order, most meaningful bonds not family, culture, nation. School. Work. social web connect us on interest, experience and world view. we can find each other, learn.

HYBRIDS

EH community started teaching me. Podcast roundtable discussion, realized all using creativity to manage hybrid, multifaceted lives. Flex skills/perspectives cd bring to all endeavors. Our life trajectory not a liability! Cd be asset.

AUTHOR PLATFORM

While launching EH online, also working on 2nd book, about my friendship with a multiple personality. Problem. After success/acceptance of EH book -- 5 yrs -- committing career suicide? lose my audience, or transition them to new topic? to prepare my author platform for 2nd book, began explaining why cultural writer shifting to psychological topic. Emphasizing identity, how formed thru culture -- getting away from travel focus. Also apparent expat and hybrid life writing more concerned with personality and psyche issues than travel often is.

MULTIPLE CULTURAL IDENTITIES

there WAS a link between past work, new book. have multiple CULTURAL personalities -- like a multiple personality, honor/care for each key to health/happiness. Career 'problem' both addressed personal issue and paved new pro growth! We have fusion!

GLOBAL NICHE DEFINED

called expat+HAREM site global niche, meant niche for globalists, home in world. 6 mos definition emerged. Looking at lifestyle design, location independent movements pioneering gate-jumping new paradigms, digital nomadic practices we require when geographically or culturally disadvantaged.

Detected my community's distinctly different need. Our question not Generation-Y: "how can i live on a beach in Thailand by running a blog."

PSYCHIC LOCATION INDEPENDENCE

Instead, PLU looking for in a GN is answer to: "how can I live the life I want wherever it is I happen to be?" To live/ work to our abilities independent of location and whatever its limitations.

Maybe still in hometown, or everyone speaks language we're not good at -- whether language of tongue, some other kind. best customers 10 time zones away?.

This addresses more universal issue. How to be okay with where we are, plenty reasons why we are where we are. Don't always live in optimal setting for our dreams. Doesn't mean we have to defer. We can get started, right now.

GLOBAL NICHE WORKGROUP

Past yr: cofounded creative entrepreneurship workgroup, mastermind how building life/livelihoods around strengths and interests. What we UNIQUELY bring. Belonging into own hands, playing with possibilities to find ourselves, audience, peers. Focus on web platforms reflect our place in the world, connect to relevant ppl, communities, integrate into offline activities.

Love fusion. NOW combining workgroup with expat+HAREM mission to make our psychic limbo a productive state. A global niche workgroup.

Developing private edu community -- GLOBALNICHE.net -- to equip psychically location independent PLU -- transglobal, multicultural, dreamer in a situation mismatch -- with skills/ tools need to achieve dreams.

Please visit so we can keep u posted about upcoming launch. Thank you TurkishWIN, good night.

Masterminding An Expat's Reluctant Entrepreneurism

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group). Each participant presents her case study and we brainstorm next steps.

Here are some of my thoughts on an expatriate writer's mention that if she weren't an expat and forced to find ways to make a living outside the norm, she wouldn't be an entrepreneur.

It reminds me of the Dialogue2010 conversations at expat+HAREM, and how our hybrid lives have *forced* us to be flexible about a lot of things most people (especially those in our 'previous lives' if we're living outside an original territory, including who we might have been if we'd stayed) never have to deal with. Our careers are one of those things.

The beauty of being a creative entrepreneur is that it's about making your work type and situation *work* for you, for the type of person you are, and the situation you face. That doesn't mean it's the easy choice, just that it has the potential to deliver much more than you'd get from being a cog in someone else's wheel.

Was also reading something the other day about how we don't have to make money from everything we produce (or even try to sell it), but if we're professionals (or hope to be, that is, we're not hobbyists) earning money for the work we do has to be part of the larger plan.

Writing ONLY for money is different type of job than writing what you want to write and receiving money for it (at some point on the journey, and maybe not directly from the writing).

If your interest in writing dries up at the prospect of selling it, or using it as a form of content marketing for something else you are selling, then maybe writing is not an element of the paid work you want to do. Maybe you want to keep it as a hobby, a special form of personal entertainment. That's totally cool.

But, if you harbor dreams of yourself as a professional writer, not only sharing your work widely but receiving compensation for it, then writing *is* an element of your livelihood. If you have the luxury of already knowing what you want to write, and already writing what you want to write (some people are on a different carousel, where they write for hire and dream of writing from the heart and soul and it's hard to get off that carousel for the very reason that it's scary and hard) then all you have to add to your picture is a strategy to get paid for what you are already doing.

Will you have to make changes in your plans, will you have to improve to be competitive, will you have to be sensitive to your readership? Will you have to be aware of the market and how it works and what the shifts are in publishing? Will you see clearly whether you have achieved your professional writing goals or not? Yes.

In fact, writing might suddenly seem like a different kind of work if all that stuff I just mentioned has previously been kept separate from your writing life. I think this might be the key for you. Integrating in small steps your writing as professional, and with a market purpose.

++

Another participant of the group points out this post by creativity coach Mark McGuinness of Lateral Action that if Shakespeare had continued to work for a patron, we may never have heard of him.