This is an amazing piece, Natalie. Your multifaceted identity gives you such insight into the different ways in which we fit, or fail to fit, and are expected or demanded by others to fit, into so many different sociocultural contexts.

But I particularly admire the calm, patient, non-judgemental wisdom with which you recount your experience.

It is always helpful to be reminded of the privilege enjoyed by those of us who live in a culture where we are the dominant norm who turn no heads and attract neither curiosity nor suspicion simply by existing. But it is also a very narrow view of the world, through the eye slits of a medieval knight's helmet. We are protected, but isolated from much of reality.

I will always remember the experience of getting on subway trains in Tokyo when I worked there briefly, and seeing that as the rest of the passengers boarded, they would all take any seats available other than the ones next to me, the odd gaijin, who probably smelt different and might do some weird and disgusting thing like produce a handkerchief and blow my nose.

I was 30 years old and had never experienced that before - and it was not, of course, in any way threatening or limiting in the exquisitely safe and polite society of Japan.

Another revelation was when a Jewish friend of mine in Britain said that when he travelled to Israel to visit family, the moment he stepped off the plane he felt he was home, felt safe. (A perception which itself opens up a whole new rift in reality, especially now.)

To me he was just another straight, white, middle-class British-born guy like myself - but he always felt that someone's eyes could be burning the nape of his neck, marking him as different, suspecting and mistrusting him, because of a facial feature, a shop he had just come out of, the neighbourhood he was in.

The striking thing was we looked alike enough that people would sometimes assume we were brothers. We had similar hair, beards and glasses, almost like we were both wearing the same disguise. But the feeling of otherness that lay beneath that for him was something I would never experience or truly comprehend.