I grew up on Curaçao and built a life in the Netherlands, and somewhere in the crossing I picked up a skill I didn't recognise as a skill until much later: the constant, quiet awareness that the same words land differently depending on who's receiving them. This is a more personal post than usual — a bit of where I come from — but it's here because that awareness turns out to underpin almost everything I care about in communication, and I've come to think it's the most useful thing I know.
Between cultures, you can't take meaning for granted
If you grow up in one culture, speaking one language, among people who share your references, communication feels effortless and mostly invisible. You say a thing, it means what you intended, done. You never have to think about the machinery, because the machinery works silently.
Grow up between cultures — different languages, different humour, different unspoken rules about directness, warmth, what's polite and what's rude — and that invisibility disappears. You learn young that a phrase that's warm in one place is blunt in another; that a joke that lands in one language dies in translation; that the same sentence, said to two people from two backgrounds, can produce two completely different reactions. You can't take meaning for granted, because you've watched it fail to cross too many times.
That's disorienting as a child. As an adult, it's turned out to be a gift. Because you develop, out of necessity, a permanent second question running under every conversation: not just what do I want to say, but how will this actually land for the person in front of me?
The message is never just the message
That's the lesson, distilled. A message is never just its content — it's its content plus the receiver, plus the context, plus everything the receiver brings that you don't. Meaning doesn't live in the words. It lives in the collision between the words and the person hearing them. And if you've spent your life moving between contexts where that collision plays out differently, you internalise it as a reflex: you're always, a little, translating.
I used to think of my background as just biography — where I happen to be from. I've come to see it as the origin of how I think about communication altogether. Whether I'm writing a website for a small business, shaping a campaign, or explaining a research finding, the same reflex fires: who is on the other end of this, and what will it actually mean to them? That question, I now believe, is the whole of good communication. Everything else is technique.
A small example
Let me make it concrete, because "cultures communicate differently" is easy to nod at and easy to underestimate. Dutch communication prizes directness — saying the plain thing plainly is respected, even kind; it treats you as an adult who can handle the truth. In much of the Caribbean world I grew up in, that same directness can read as cold or even rude, because warmth and relationship are meant to carry the message alongside its content.
So the identical sentence — a straight, unvarnished piece of feedback, say — is considerate in one setting and harsh in another. Not because the words changed, but because the receivers bring different rules for what the words mean. I learned to feel that difference in real time: to sense when the plain version would land as honesty, and when it needed a little warmth wrapped around it to be heard the way I intended.
That's code-switching, and it's exhausting until it becomes instinct — and then it turns into a kind of superpower, because you stop assuming your way of saying things is the way. You begin every message already asking how it'll be received, not just what you meant. Which, it turns out, is the whole discipline of communicating well: never mistaking what you said for what they heard.
Why this belongs on a blog mostly about data and the web
You might reasonably wonder what any of this is doing here, among posts about analytics and SEO. Here's the connection, and it's the thread I keep pulling. All the technical work I do — measuring how people use a website, reading what an audience responds to, turning language into data — is, underneath, about the same thing writing across cultures taught me: that communication is a collision between a message and a receiver, and that understanding the receiver is the hard, essential part. The tools change. That truth doesn't.
Meaning doesn't live in the words. It lives in the space between what you said and who was listening. Grow up crossing that space and you never stop noticing it.
So this is the personal root of a professional obsession. Curaçao and Amsterdam gave me, without my noticing, a lifelong habit of watching how meaning survives — or doesn't — the trip from one person to another. It's why I can't look at a message, or increasingly a dataset, without asking who's really on the other end, and what they'll make of it that I didn't intend. That question started long before any of the work I do now, in a childhood spent translating between worlds. It might be the truest thing I brought with me across the water — and the one I'd least like to lose.