When Borders Keep Shifting
- Halima Snoussi
- 3 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Do you ever think about why you were born where you were born?
I was born in France because a border opened. When France granted Tunisia independence in March of 1956, my father crossed the Mediterranean sea along with thousands of others, carrying with him a language, a faith, a culture, and a hope that the new world would be gentler. That decision between a man seeking opportunity and a nation opening its borders shaped my existence before I ever took my first breath. It decided who I would be, the languages I would speak, and where I would call home.
As a student in neuroscience and psychology at King’s College London, I have always been interested in empathy, resilience, and the mind-body connection, and how these take shape in people’s lives. This piece comes from trying to understand how identity is shaped not only by personal experience, but by the borders around us.
Growing up, my sense of self was split between my parents’ nostalgia for the places they’d left behind and my own need to belong where I was. Soon, a feeling of unbelonging set in. In France, I was the Arab girl. In Tunisia, I was the French girl. Only on those summer crossings across the Mediterranean Sea from Marseille to Tunis did I ever truly feel at home, surrounded by others who, like me, also lived in-between, carrying languages, memories, and cultures from both lands. The boat was our shared borderland, proof that identity could be plural, even if the world refused to see it that way.
I learned early that politics doesn’t just live in parliaments and history books. It moves through families, seeps into childhoods, and reshapes how we see ourselves.
The first time I realised how fragile belonging could be was on September 11th 2001. The shift in atmosphere was immediate. During la “récré” at school, when all children meet, conversations changed. Friends I had previously felt at ease with now spoke as if there was a line drawn between us. It seemed as though the world was asking me to choose a side, yet it had already been chosen for me. I wasn’t just Halima anymore, I was the Muslim. A word that once meant family, tradition, and faith now carried with it accusations. Overnight, it turned into a label others used to measure how threatening I might be. So, I started editing myself, lowering my voice, erasing parts of who I was. I remember hesitating over the “Muslim” box on job applications, wondering if “honesty” was a risk I could afford.
Years later, I moved to the UK. During Brexit, that same unease would return. The quiet fear that belonging could once again be redefined without my consent. As a French citizen, remember the anxiety that came with uncertainty, checking the news every day, wondering if a vote or a policy might decide whether I could stay. Eventually, I was granted indefinite leave to remain, but the uncertainty clarified something. Citizenship, I learned, is not just a passport; it is a fragile permission to feel at home.
Even now, that sense of instability lingers. Borders keep shifting, sometimes on maps, sometimes in laws, and sometimes in people’s minds. As I watch what is happening in Palestine, I am reminded that these lines are never just political; they are deeply human. They decide who gets to live in safety, who is seen as deserving of empathy, and who becomes invisible.
My life has been shaped by borders inherited, imagined, and imposed. But what is happening in Palestine, and in so many places like it, reminds us that these borders shape our collective humanity too. They determine how far empathy can travel, and how easily the world forgets that every line drawn on a map cuts through someone’s life. And, as we scroll our social media, the unbearable grief streams past: Gaza, Sudan, lives unraveling. Wedged between a recipe, an influencer’s makeup ad, and someone dancing.
I often wonder what this constant collision between tragedy and triviality is doing to us, collectively, as we witness threat after threat with almost no meaningful action available. We refresh. We repost. We send money. We argue. And then the algorithm lifts us onto something lighter: someone’s lunch, a dog video, a joke. How it this reshaping the way we feel, empathise, and cope. What does it mean for our minds to witness so much, and to be able to do so little?
This oscillation can look like numbness from the outside. But often it is the nervous system doing what it must to keep us going: dipping in and out of tolerable windows of feeling. It isn’t apathy; it’s survival. Still, survival has side effects. Prolonged exposure to the world’s pain can blur compassion into exhaustion, and exhaustion can harden into detachment. The danger isn’t just that we stop caring; it’s that we stop believing our care matters.
When I think back to my father stepping onto that ferry in the late 1950s, I picture a border opening both on paper and in the mind. A possibility. A permission. He didn’t know he was boarding a ship that would deliver me a different language, a different school, a different harbour to grow up in. He just knew that he was moving towards a life that might be kinder.
I don’t have easy answers. I only have a life that has been narrated by openings and closures, by papers stamped and faces scanned, by the relief of being waved through, and the shame of being questioned. I have the memory of a boat where I felt both French and Tunisian and fully myself, and the knowledge that many people never get to feel that way anywhere.
Borders will continue to shift. The question is not whether lines exist but what kind of people we become in relation to them. Do we narrow our circle of concern until only the familiar fits inside, or do we widen it, even when widening hurts?
Perhaps the smallest, most radical act is to refuse to let our compassion be automated by an algorithm. To choose, deliberately, to look and keep looking. To tell the longer story. To notice the person who is asked, again and again, “Where are you really from?” and to understand the weariness behind their smile. To remember that for every policy there is a family; for every statistic a child; for every map a pair of hands that must carry something precious across a line.
I was born because a border opened. Many are living and dying because borders close. Between those two facts is our responsibility: to keep enlarging the space in which more people can belong, and to keep insisting that belonging is not a zero-sum game.
