Migration is complicated

Migration is hard. It's so hard that many of us don't call it migration. We call it relocation. People who leave their home country to live in another country "relocate." I said the same thing when I first came to Berlin fifteen years ago. It wasn't true. Relocation, properly speaking, is when your employer moves you for a fixed time to work out of another one of its offices somewhere in the world. I moved to Berlin on a work visa that SoundCloud arranged for me, for a job they offered me. No fixed term, no agreement on the time frame.

Migration is so hard that even here, in a piece where I actually want to talk about migration, I gave it the title "Migration is complicated."

It's not really that complicated. It's just hard.

Migration, even migration like ours, chosen, wanted, planned, undertaken from a position of privilege, is hard. Sometimes it's exactly those privileged conditions that make it harder, or that make us, the ones going through it, harder on ourselves. Because if we're doing something we wanted, it's uncomfortable to admit it's hard. Because we wanted it so much, the hardship involved isn't easy to recognize, to name, to hold, to be with.

A crisis is often defined as a condition in which the coping mechanisms a person has always relied on no longer bring any relief. Migration, moving the center of our lives somewhere else, is exactly that: a condition in which none of our usual coping mechanisms are available. All our anchors: family, friends, physical home, everything familiar and known are gone.

At times it feels as if we no longer know ourselves. As if we no longer are ourselves. How we perceive and experience ourselves is bound up with the world we live in, the roles we play in it, our web of relationships to the people and places around us. All of that shifts when we move to another country, and that shift can produce real confusion about who we are, especially the parts of our identity tied to place, location, nationality.

A lot of the difficulty comes from knowing that we brought this migration on ourselves. And if there's a partner, a family, then we brought it on them too. There's real potential there for guilt, regret, self-criticism and doubt, for losing our self-confidence and trust in ourselves.

And there's loneliness, and a sense of seperation. Seperation from our people, friends and family. Separation from ourselves, from who we used to be. And separation from a larger story we used to belong to, from the narrative that bonds us with the people we knew all our lives, the people from our hometown, our homeland. It's like we stepped out of that narrative, took ourselves out of the picture, left the movie mid-way. And the movie continues, just without us. We will never be there for certain moments and events, the ones our people back home went through together. We have our own story instead, but it's a private one, just ours, not a shared story, not something that belongs to anyone else. That, too, is part of migration.

The first time I migrated as an adult was to India. No plan, no intention behind it. I got there and stayed a year and a half, went home to renew my visa, and came back for another year. I was in my early thirties. I wasn't the type you'd expect to end up in India. The trip itself, and even more so the fact that I stayed, surprised me, and everyone who knew me. Up to that point, the people I measured myself against were literature people, colleagues from working as a content product manager, and fellow activists on the left. I had no idea, it never even occurred to me, that there was a "spiritual" side in me. Life in India was, for me, a life outside myself, outside my own world, a life with no reference point, no reference group.

That's also part of migration: living without a reference group, without the people we're used to measuring ourselves against. The old one stops being relevant. The new one hasn't formed yet, we're in the process of forming it, and in the middle of that process it can be hard to even remember, to imagine, to hope that one day it will exist. There's a lot of freedom in that, a lot of openness and possibility, living without a reference group, and a lot of difficulty too.

And if anything written here speaks to you, you're warmly welcome to reach out. I'm not a practical relocation consultant. What I do offer is help giving words to what you're going through, and, above all, above all, above all, listening.