My Emigration Experience
Half a year ago I moved from Saint-Petersburg (Russia) to Budapest. This post is about the insights I gained during 6 months of emigration.
I am 22 y. o. and it has now been half a year since I moved from Saint Petersburg (Russia) to Budapest. During this time I experienced a lot of feelings that were new for me because all of them were sparked by emigration. In this post, I am analyzing some of these emotions and thoughts.
I experienced nostalgia (not reading about it in novels, but actually feeling it myself), the feeling that I was happy here in Budapest, but not as happy as I used to be in Saint Petersburg, I felt like I have forever lost some very important part of my life and sometimes I felt a desire to return. I had to cope with these emotions somehow, had to understand and explain them to myself. Now that I have come up with some solutions for these complicated issues I want to share them here.
It is not the places that we miss, but people and emotions.
When we say «I miss place X», we usually do not mean that we miss the place as such. We do not actually mean that we miss the buildings we saw in that particular city, or the road, or the cars, or whatever.
We mean that we miss people who were with us at that place or emotions we experienced: the feeling of love, excitement, happiness, etc. But when we need to articulate this feeling we use a shorter form, so that others could understand us, and say that we «miss the place X».
Place, in this case, is just a kind of anchor that simplifies the explanation. But you can actually feel the same emotions in a completely different place with completely different people. Then you will miss a new «place» (in fact — people and feelings).
I felt this sharply when I stood on one of the streets in Budapest on a sunny autumn day. Leaves were rustling under my feet and rosehips blooming nearby, and this reminded me of one street in my district in Saint Petersburg in which I lived for 21 years, and I thought: «I miss Saint Petersburg».
And suddenly I understood that it was not about my home city as such at all. I used to have the same things in Saint Petersburg: sunny autumn days, leaves rustling under my feet and rosehips blooming in summer. They even looked almost the same as in Budapest, so now I also had them. But I still felt like I missed something. And at some point I understood that I was missing not the flowers or the sounds. I was missing people, whom I loved to spend time with in Saint Petersburg and whom I can not meet here, in Budapest. The rosehip is the same, the leaves are the same and they triggered me on my home city and the emotions which I experienced there and which I miss now. The emotions, not the place.
Expanding the boundaries of consciousness.
During these 6 months I understood that one is not obliged to become an emigrant once and forever. You can always return to your home country, and it is not a defeat or weakness. But even a temporary emigration gives you very valuable and indispensable experience: it broadens your horizons drastically.
Because to live in a foreign country means to normalize for yourself the thought that the world is not limited to your home city and your country.
In theory this idea seems obvious and understandable, but it becomes really clear and even habitual only in practice — when you come to a foreign country not for a week on a vacation, but to live there. Especially if this country is 2500 km far from your home city and people there do not speak your mother tongue.
Emigration helps me know myself better. Know my limits in all life spheres, my true wishes, my ability to get up and do things I do not want to do — because nobody else is going to do them except me. Things which seemed impossible and impracticable for me before relocation now became almost routine. Now I know that I can buy a ticket and visit my parents who live in another country, travel alone to any place in Europe, apply for an internship abroad, etc. A year ago I could not even imagine doing such kind of things on my own and not planning thoroughly every step.
Emigration helps me know my country better as well. A large is seen from a distance and very often it is difficult to understand global processes being inside the process. It becomes possible at a distance however. When you have time and energy to think about something else rather than enrolment into one university, graduation from another, obstacles accompanying visa application and the constant nervous pressure.
It is impossible to «not make the most» of the situation
You can just take more from one part of some life period and less — from another.
I am getting my Master’s degree in Budapest (Russian Language and Literature) and some people may think I am not making the most of it, because I am not engaging in the classes as much as I could, I still have not made up my mind about the topic of my dissertation, unlike my friends who are studying at Russian universities (all of us are graduating in 2025) and I do not read much during semester.
But I am getting a different experience here. I am learning to manage my life in a foreign country (after having lived with my parents in my home city for 21 years), I am enjoying my trips to other European countries (luckily Budapest is located in the center of Europe), I learn a lot from my roommate (who speaks 6 languages and has confectionery education. And she is younger than me).
I am gaining an amazing experience beyond university life. I gain much, much more than I could have if I would spend time and effort attending classes and doing homework.
I made this choice and it cannot be said that I am not «making the most» of my Master’s. I am making different of it. And it was emigration that showed me this was also a possible scenario.
It is in my power to create new moments of happiness in new places.
One day I understood that I felt such acute pain when thinking about my life in Russia mostly because I have a lot of positive memories connected with this period of my life. And when I moved to Budapest I felt (unconsciously) as if all this would never happen again and it was a tragedy (literally), it felt almost like death. Later I came to understand that it will really never happen again because it is impossible to repeat things that made me happy in Russia again in the same way.
But I also came to understand that I can create new moments of happiness with people that now surround me and are now important for me in my new emigration life.
I can travel around Europe with my friend I met in Budapest, visit my family who also lives now in a different country, spend there quality time with my sister, explore Budapest, etc. And later I will be missing this happy period of my life and it will also be impossible to repeat it. It was not about Russia as a place initially, it was about my memories linked with it.
Emigration taught me to cope with difficulties more easily.
Emigration has actually become the first really big goal and trial in my life. My biggest achievement before that was enrolment to the most prestigious philological faculty in Russia. I do not want to diminish my own experience, but to tell the truth, it was easier than emigration… the necessity to enroll in a foreign university, apply for a residence permit (which neither I, nor my parents have ever done before), manage independent life abroad and to cope with the thought that it was not a temporary trip with the purpose of study, but an emigration — all this was a real strength test.
Earlier I used to be afraid of difficulties. I was not able to talk tough with people who were ignoring their job responsibilities, I was shy of reminding people about things they promised to do, but have not done, I was not stubborn enough to make others (and myself) alter incorrectly prepared documents. An ordinary phone talk with a stranger was a big deal for me actually.
But the necessity to emigrate changed all these qualities of mine a lot. Every time I felt I «could not do something» I reminded myself that nobody else was going to do that for me (although my parents helped me a lot). And if I do not get this or that document, I will not be able to leave. It was a real struggle, I had to push through hesitation and discomfort literally every day at the graduation course to make myself get up and fix all the relocation tasks.
Having overcome all this I look back at the person I was half a year ago and feel how far I have come. It really helped me to reconsider my view on what difficulties were.
Emigration is definitely changing me a lot and I will continue writing about my experience and observations. If you also had emigration experience and feel like sharing your insights, I would be glad to read your story!
P.
If you enjoyed this post, you can read some of my other texts:
