The Borrowed Gaze: When Other People’s Judgment Becomes Your Inner Voice

At some point, the voice in your head stops being entirely yours.It becomes shaped by something else.Not imposed. Not forced.But absorbed, repeated, and eventually… believed.This is where the Identity Gap begins to widen.In this episode, I introduce the Borrowed Gaze the moment external perception stops being something you notice, and starts becoming the way you see yourself.It begins with what I call the First Mirror Moment: a subtle shift where you realise you are no longer just living you are being interpreted.From there, something changes. Awareness becomes internal.Internalisation becomes automatic.And over time, you stop asking: Who am I? And start adjusting to: How am I being seen?This is not a single moment. It’s a process:Awareness → Internalisation → AutomationAnd inside that process, the Identity Gap quietly expands between who you are, who you’ve learned to perform, and who you haven’t fully reclaimed yet.This episode draws on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault not as theory, but as language for something deeply lived: the experience of seeing yourself through more than one lens, and slowly forgetting which one was yours to begin with.Follow The Modern Migrant for future episodes exploring the Identity Gap and life between worlds.Subscribe to our ⁠SubStack⁠ newsletter