Embracing Being an Immigrant Made Me Feel Like I Belong
The internal woes and universal kinship of the immigrant experience
I wrote this piece one and a half years ago, and reading it back now feels like a kind of reassurance.
Every time I return to my home country for a yearly visit, I feel a little more alien, more estranged, and more disconnected than the year before. Living in another country for over a decade does that to you. It’s a sad feeling when you realize that you don’t belong there anymore, but it’s not necessarily a negative one. You know that all the change the other country put you through was good for you — but it takes time until your heart catches up, too. I knew for a long time that Hungary wasn’t my “home” anymore, but it was about two years ago when that really sunk in.
I sat on the terrace of a dump of a bar surrounded by a bunch of low-life alcoholics. I was there with an old friend who became a regular at the place and befriended every one of those drunks. I felt uncomfortable. Out of place, out of country. I remember one of them asking where I live and what I do. When I answered, I saw a total blankness in his eyes — he just couldn't relate. In the same way, I no longer identified with anyone in that country or condoned how they lived. I had a lot of interactions like that in the past ten years.
The last time I visited, about three months ago, I arrived with a slightly different mindset. I treated the whole trip as if I were a tourist in my country and not someone who grew up there. After all, I felt for years that I didn't belong, so I thought, why would I think or act like I did. Instead of wanting to reconnect with childhood friends that I fell out with over the years, I focused on my family. I spent more time with them than usual, and it was a pleasant surprise rather than overwhelming and strained. I let go of wanting to be a past version of myself. I didn't try to show up for people who no longer showed up for me. It's hard to accept that all those you grew up with — with whom you shared some of the most joyous and vulnerable moments of your life before — just don’t care for you anymore. But it’s even harder to admit you shouldn’t care for them either.
Yet I did have a positive encounter with someone I was never really close with despite knowing him for nearly two decades. We always meet up when I’m back, and now it was pretty much the same routine. Nothing out of the ordinary, but this time, I realized that although I never considered him a close friend (not in high school, not in my adult life), I related to him the most out of all my childhood buddies. The reason is blatantly obvious: he used to be an immigrant, too. Though he spent fewer years abroad and felt content moving back home, which I would never do, we shared aspects of our lives that now connected us more than ever. It was the simple things: talking about foreign food, the jobs we had, the money we earned, the cost of living in various countries, and anything we experienced as immigrants. Just comparing and talking about those everyday things created a bond between us that I didn’t share with any of my other friends who didn’t emigrate.
As an immigrant, I always feel like I'm in between two worlds. I don't belong to the country that birthed me nor the one I currently occupy. But whenever I return to Hungary for a vacation, I’m always forced to become the past version of myself. Even if I don't want to be that person anymore, there's always a pressure weighing on my shoulders, telling me that I should. If I attempt to show that I’m not that person anymore, people brush me off since they can't understand what that really means because they never saw me in my current surroundings. There are cultural differences you just can’t comprehend if you haven’t experienced them yourself. If you haven’t lived the life of an immigrant — as challenging and rewarding as it can be at the same time — you can only guess what that truly feels like. It’s that simple.
My dad found that out first-hand. He moved to Austria in his early 50s, four years after me, and has been living there since. His emigration entirely shifted our relationship, and we've become closer than ever. I’ll never forget when he said after living abroad for about six months that now he "gets it." He told me he had a much greater understanding of what I'd been going through when I moved to the UK. How intimidating it was to get by in a country where you don’t speak the language, have a family to support you, or know anyone. And how magical it can be if you’re willing to adjust your mindset and worldview to a different culture and its dynamics in a country that welcomes you with open arms.
Once, on my way from London to Hungary, I met a middle-aged family man at the airport. We started chatting, and I found out he lived seven years in England with his wife and kids. We hit it off instantly. We discussed jobs and property prices, terrible drivers, and the constant traveling between countries. Our interaction was effortless. We were on the same page because we instantly recognized that change of mentality in each other, which was caused by an experience only a few immigrants know. Only those open to accepting that once we leave our homeland permanently, we’ll never be the same people as before — with the possibility that we might never feel that we belong anywhere again.
There’s a certain freedom in embracing the duality of being an outsider. I may no longer have a country that I can (or want to) wholeheartedly call home, but wherever I go, I'll likely be able to find and connect with people who feel the same. Once you can make peace with that realization, you’ll find that rootlessness can be a comforting blanket instead of an identity crisis — a chance that allows you to attach yourself to people and emotions, not places and cultures that are supposed to define you.
But I’m aware that being an immigrant isn’t always a choice but a necessity for some. Many of those who end up living outside of their countries will never leave the motherland behind at heart or let another country fade or erase the core values they bring from there. Sometimes, I even wish to feel like them — that it’d be easier to live a life if I had a love for my country instead of hate. But then I remind myself that it's not a coincidence I'm here and not there, that I seek the company of people from different cultures, and that I want to connect with others who'd been through what I'd been through and came out of it as a new, better person.
It’s not easy to live like this, knowing that no matter how good things get, you may never feel like you belong wherever you are. I chose this path because a voice inside me kept getting louder and louder, telling me to search for something. I’m unsure if I’ll ever find that “thing,” but I’m certain that wherever I decide to go, there will be people like me (countryless searchers) who can make me feel like I belong. You see, immigrants often speak the language of each other — even if they actually don’t — because the longing in their hearts translates the emotions that are universal. But only if you embrace being an immigrant can you learn to be fluent in it. And once you do, you’ll have the chance to find a home anywhere in the world that has no borders.
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