I developed a stern and expansive butler early, based on a natural tendency to seek to please the authorities around me - I’m not much of a rebel.

It occurs to me that one of the best things I have done to manage the butler was to become an expat - moving abroad changed the rules of the game.

I’m foreign, and I have an accent I can’t lose, I’ll never be mistaken for a local. My butler doesn’t know the right advice here, what I can build in terms of a new butler suggests avenues that aren’t always feasible for me, and I’m often excused from local butler guidance because I lack awareness or am simply recognised to be an oddity and not required to comply. I can integrate, and be accepted, but I have to make my own path.

I always felt it was an extra burden, as there is rarely a slot for me to fit in so I have to make one, but it is also quite liberating because I am not bound in the same way others are. I can tell my butler how it will work for me because I’m a special case.

I’m never going to fit in, I’m going to be odd, so I might as well be odd in the way I want to be.

It can be tiring, and sometimes it can be scary and feel lonely to not have a tribe, but if I make the effort to share my objective and how I see it might work, others modify to accommodate, assist me to work out the details, and there I find connection and kind support and a means to integrate.

Still, it would be nice to have some mates just like me…maybe I can use this ripple approach to create a tribe where we think it silly to care about the butler’s worries and instead do what we want.