Pitfall Travel
If You’re Considering Moving Abroad
Thoughts to my sister who’s thinking of changing continents, from her older sister who’s moving abroad again in a few hours
Think well about it. It’s a huge sacrifice and no one's family is going to feel as warm as yours (even though ours can be pretty horrible sometimes). No house is going to welcome you as openly as the one you grew up in.
You’re young. A year feels like nothing to you now when really, it decides a lot about who you become. Life has a butterfly effect in your 20s.
When you leave, consider you might leave forever. You might be thinking to yourself that you’ve got a plan, but life changes your plans sometimes. All the time. You might change your mind and your own plans.
You see opportunity in the land you’ve chosen. And yes, there’s opportunity there. It’s everything you long for and much more. Your life will turn around, most likely for the better. You pay for it dearly and like a mortgage loan, you’ll pay the interest rate with each visit home, and then some more when market factors change. Because the people you leave behind have it easy: there’s only got one of you to miss. You’ve got the shorter end of the stick and the weight in your heart will always drag you down a little. You’ll learn to live with it, eventually.
You learn to live with it: what a cliché. I’ll tell you what that means. You’re going to keep hurting but the life in front of you will hide the pain from view. You’ll grow used to ignoring it, the longing for a life you used to know, and for the comfort of a shoulder you’ve known your entire life to cry on. When you need it, you’re going to see half of it cut off by the frame of your mobile screen. You can look but you can’t touch. Of course, you’ll find new shoulders to cry on but none will feel like the shoulders you’ve known forever.
You’ll miss out on life events, you’ll miss out on the joy. You’ll miss just “being there”. You’ll miss the last times. You’ll miss the first times. And you’ll miss them in yours.
You’ll feel surrounded by strangers. And long to come home. You’ll consider it several times a week, then several times a month, and then give up on the idea. It’s always going to be a backup anyway.
It’s going to be a wound, then a scar. Some things will rub against it and open it up —and the pain will pour out and hit before you see it coming.
You’re going to be a stranger there. And then you’re going to be a stranger here. You’ll always feel like you belong in the place that you’re away from. Belongingness will always elude you. It’s going to take years until you realize that you belong to neither place, but you belong to both. You become a citizen of the world; planes will become like buses: public transport.
You’ll find new people, learn new ways, look at new horizons, ignore the pain. And it will make you stronger but also more vulnerable because you’ll never know your comfort zone again, which is exactly what you want now but what you’ll want back later.
But it’s what makes life worth living in the end.
