The struggle we feel in being out of place.

I am reading a book of biracial/bicultural/multicultural/multiethnic experiences. It is strange to hear people resonate with how I have felt on and off much of my life. There is a strange aloneness involved in being essentially undefinable. People who seek outside of their own culture for some kind of belonging, people who have too many cultures to claim true belonging to any of their "cultures" look for meaning in all cultures. Strangely, I feel at home in places where I have no cultural or ethnic ties, and I have heard others say the same. How can a white Icelandic/Irish American feel at home in Saudi Arabia or Kenya, more so than at home in her native cultures? (To some this is illogical). Somehow for people who examine, study or attempt to "heal" these people, multis (for lack of a better name at the moment) are sad examples of failure, on their own behalf, their parents, and not seen as a failure of culture and society to look at them as full and true people who see the world in unique ways.
Yes, the struggle to be more than mono is sometimes hard, often alienating, and requires one to explain oneself more than one should, but for me and so many of the people I know, the ability to be many in one is a strength and a treasure. We can talk to, understand and sympathize with so many different experiences. We create our own networks, be they cultural, social, racial or ethnic. Each circle is different and has its strengths and weaknesses, but rarely do we feel less complete or less unified than a mono does.
The book speaks to me of a sadness not bound in confusion and lack of awareness, rather of sadness bound in pity for those who fail to understand, accept and need to constantly categorize us as one or the other or whatever seems to be appropriate at the time. We get angry, frustrated or saddened by people who are too short sited to accept and tolerate ambiguity. We are not psychologically damaged as teens when we form our identity, because this struggle is "torn from a oneness." We come out stronger and more vibrant, more creative, and ultimately enduring because of the external boundaries placed on us, by a narrow-minded society.
At times I have felt lonely and out of place, both here in the US and in Iceland. More often in Iceland where in the mid seventies, foreign born individuals and multiethic people where in short supply, and the culture was still homogeneous enough to consider Icelandic/Americans as not full Icelanders. I left with a deep cultural understands, abiding language skill in one of the most complex Indo-European languages, the ability to speak, read or understand six languages and the distinct feeling of an outsider. But I digress perhaps a tad, reading Half and Half, there is the same loneliness I have felt and begin to wonder if my child has felt any of these things.