Happysad

The cat is upside down because her name is Happysad. She follows me to my favourite coffee shop from time to time. Today, I put her name in my calendar, under June, 23rd.

Some of You don’t know that, but most of my closest family has emigrated from Poland during the past 20–30 years. Here’s the thing I mention rarely: my parents and us lived in different countries at that time.

I remember travelling abroad every few months to see my mom in Vienna.
I remember having 17 nannies.
I remember missing her.
I remember the fear of being stopped at the border without giving us a reason or an explanation why.

Bluntly speaking, not being Austrian / German / [put almost any non post-communist block country here] seemed to be enough to justify that. And in some silly, scary, dark way — it seemed obvious even to us, it made us feel that we didn’t belong there. I find it utterly sad. But things have changed.

In a sense, what happened yesterday is a bit ironic — Britain (not for the first time) trying to prove that it’s oh so incredibly different from the rest of the continent fell in the same trap of narrow-minded bigotry as anyone else.

I won’t delve into criticising people who voted leave, or this, to put it mildly — admittedly creative excuse of a campaign, we’ve had the pleasure to observe during the past few months — I see no reason to think about it in the terms of us and them, especially given the current social and political discourse in the country I was born in.

Also, because some good things happened too:

Yesterday, one my my friends left his work earlier, just to take a 2h train to his home town to vote. Regardless of what happened a few hours later, it means a lot to me. I prefer to focus on that.