The honest answer is long

Where are you from is a question with one slot in it. None of the facts behind my answer is complicated on its own, but there are several and they sit in an order: secondary school finished in Dubai, university started in Ottawa, three languages behind all of it, none of which I chose. Ottawa is where the degrees are, where the work has been, and where I live. They do not compress into a word.

The question that asks for the word is almost always friendly. That is what makes it awkward to answer badly.

A category and a sequence

Somebody asking where you are from is asking for a category. They want one item from a list they already hold, so that they can put you next to people they already know something about. That is not an insult. It is what categories are for, and everybody does it constantly, and most of the time it works because most people can supply one.

What I have is a sequence. Not a place, an order of places, and the order is load-bearing, because a person who went from A to B is a different person from one who went from B to A even where the two places are identical. A sequence does not fit in the slot. You cannot hand somebody a sequence in the two seconds the question allocates without visibly declining to answer it.

So there is a small negotiation, every time, about which one to supply. It takes almost no effort in any single instance. It is not a burden, and I want to be careful not to describe it as one, because that would be false and it would also be tedious. But it is a piece of work, it recurs, and people who have one answer never do it.

The tell is that the negotiation is not about honesty. Both answers are true. It is about how much of the other person’s attention I am entitled to spend, which is a judgement about the room, not about myself.

What I got wrong for years

I gave the long answer. I thought the short one was a kind of concession, that shortening the sequence to a category was letting somebody put me in the wrong box for their convenience.

That was wrong twice over.

It was wrong practically, because the long answer converts a pleasantry into an interview. Somebody makes a small friendly gesture and receives a paragraph, and now they have to do something with a paragraph. The polite ones ask a follow-up they do not care about. Nobody enjoys this. I was making other people pay for my accuracy.

And it was wrong about what the short answer is. It is not a smaller version of the long one. It is a different kind of statement, a statement about the conversation rather than about me, and it means roughly: this is a pleasantry and I am treating it as one. Answering a pleasantry with data is its own sort of rudeness. It says I did not read what you were doing.

I still do not have a rule for when the long answer is right. What I have noticed is that it is right about as often as somebody asks a second question, which is rarer than people think and is the actual signal.

The cost of getting good at the short one

There is a thing that happens once you can produce the short answer smoothly, and I did not anticipate it.

The short answer starts to be the one you hear. You say it enough times, in enough rooms, with enough ease, and it acquires the texture of the truth because it is the version that gets repeated back to you. The sequence is still there and it stops being the thing you reach for first, even privately.

I do not think that is assimilation exactly, and I do not think it is loss exactly. It is closer to what happens to any sentence you say too often.

The version I have landed on, if there is one, is that the short answer is for the room and the long one is for anybody who is going to be around long enough to need it. That sounds like a resolution and it is really just a scheduling decision. It does not tell me what to do in the first minute of talking to somebody I have just met, which is where the question actually gets asked.