Stranger in a Known Land, or Frontier Living

I've been thinking a lot lately about liminal space and construction of identity. Mine and LPs, mostly. It seems pretty complicated to me, and I'm not sure I've fully formed my ideas about it, but it's a theme I seem to cycle around to from time to time, so I figured I'd share the short version, and maybe cycle back here to expand next time I'm thinking about it.

Most of you know LP and I are an international, bilingual couple. That's one/ two? borders. We have each lived in each other's country of origin for significant periods of time. What we have noticed, and have confirmed as a pretty common experience with other bicultural folks, is that once you have truly crossed a border and lived in that other culture to the point of comfortably accepting many of the societal constructions of that place, you can't really ever completely come back home. That is, when you come back to the place you originally called home, it doesn't feel completely natural either. You have done irreparable 'damage' to your default world view. You can see why certain 'givens' in your culture seem silly/shocking/obscene to foreigners, because they now seem silly, etc. to you, too.

This can be a good thing, of course, but right now I am trying to get a feel for the size of the impact on a human psyche over a lifetime of not being able to go 'home'. Or maybe trying to figure out what two people can do in such a frontierland to create their own home(land?). But also, right now we are living in a few other significant liminal spaces as well, so it is perhaps more on my mind than usual. And I don't mean to say that it's horrible: it's just different, I think, from what I perceive most other peoples' experience to be.

So, if you feel like it, please tell me about your experience of being 'other' or of being caught between two worlds. Can people who share a similar experience meet up and be citizens of some combined no-man's land, even if their original border crossing happened on a different kind of threshold? What do you think? I have a practical/objective hunch that our situation is not as exceptional as I subjectively feel it to be, yet that assumption doesn't make it feel less real to me. Why should that be?