Politics & Power Quote by Ruby Wax

Ruby Wax’s line lands because it treats identity like a clerical error: not a grand existential crisis, just the nagging suspicion your paperwork got filed in the wrong country. “Misplaced American” sounds almost quaint, like a tourist who took a wrong turn. Then she detonates the premise with the punch: she doesn’t know where she was supposed to end up. The joke isn’t merely displacement; it’s the impossibility of locating an authentic home in an era that sells belonging as a lifestyle choice and selfhood as a branding exercise.

Wax, an American-born comic who made her career in Britain, compresses the immigrant/expat experience into a single anxious shrug. The line nods to that particular transatlantic whiplash: Americans abroad are often read as too loud, too earnest, too confident in the wrong ways; back home, the returnee can feel oddly foreign, like their reference points have gone stale. Her “don’t know where” refuses the sentimental resolution people expect from diaspora narratives. No promised land, no tidy “I found my tribe.” Just a GPS with no destination.

There’s also a sly mental-health subtext, fitting for Wax’s public candor about depression: feeling “misplaced” without being able to name the place you belong is what low-grade despair looks like when it’s still functioning, still witty. The line works because it’s self-deprecating but not self-pitying, diagnosing a modern condition: we’re urged to “find ourselves,” yet the map keeps changing, and the self may not be a place at all.