Using Photography to Love Beyond Words with Heather Gallagher

Love Intently Podcast with Sophie Kwok

In this episode, we tackle the tough life questions of "Who are you?" and "How do you identify yourself?" These questions are not easy for anyone to answer. For our guest Heather Gallagher, her journey of understanding and owning her identity has been especially difficult as a third culture kid.

She gives us a look behind the curtains into her world, where she is a Chinese-American who grew up in a predominantly black community, and is a CODA, which means she is the Child of a Deaf Adult.

Imagine not having a common language with your mother. Imagine constantly feeling like you are misunderstanding and being misunderstood. When you're among other Asians, you don't feel Asian enough, and when you're among white people, you want to own your place as the minority, which means rejecting a whole part of you.

These identity and culture clashes shaped Heather's childhood. Now, she's grown into even more identities like photographer, business owner, doula, spouse, new mother, and most recently, author.

Her book will be the fascinating story of how she learned to communicate with her mother without words, writing, or sign language.

Heather says, "You can be face to face with somebody and talking but not fully communicating. Your words can fail sometimes. What I hope people can learn from my story is that there there IS a way. Maybe it’s not the most direct route, but if you really care, you can find a way to connect. Maybe it’s not with words. Maybe you can create your own language."

This is a story of hope, finding your identity and how Heather learned to create her own language with her mother. And let us not forget, she also has a crazy story to tell about how she met her husband from responding to an advertisement in a magazine!

For full show notes: https://loveintently.com/blog/finding-identity-as-a-third-culture-kid

Connect with Heather
Heather is a full-spectrum Doula and family, birth and death photographer at https://www.lifesaspectrum.co/
Instagram: @lifesaspectrum

Connect with Love Intently
https://loveintently.com
Instagram: @love.intently
Instagram: @sophkwok