Ask The Flytrap: I've Got The Euro-Blues
I can't talk to anyone back home about how I feel.
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Let's get into it:
Dear Ask The Flytrap:
Help, I lived everyone's dream of fleeing the US for Europe and now I don't know how to relate to anyone any more. Better health care, infrastructure, quality of life, lack of political persecution, very real. Culture shock, language difficulties, administrative differences, massive piles of bureaucracy, also very real. I am both so stressed and not stressed. I want to cry to my old friends about my repeated failures to work out issues with the power company in a language I only started learning last year but these are the same sorts of people getting targeted by ICE, and it feels cruel. I joined a language learning group for new immigrants to make friends and it's all Syrian and Ukrainian and Kurdish asylum seekers, and they're super nice but it feels really tone deaf given that my significant other is a local. My SO and his family are super kind, but it's hard to feel understood since they haven't lived anything like this since shortly after WWII.
I'm keeping up an "everything's great look at these opportunities I'm so happy for my relative privilege" front but it's so much I'm just dying inside. Help?
Hello, Just Dying Inside!
It sounds like you're carrying a lot of guilt and shame, and that fucking sucks regardless of how you've ended up in your now-place, which I desperately wish we had more information about. Regardless, guilt and shame don't help any-fucking-body, and it sure seems like you know it, so I won't harp on that bit. So let's talk about action item number one: Can your significant other, who it sounds like may be more familiar with the local language and culture, take on the the stuff that is linguistically and bureaucratically challenging to such an extent that it's dragging your ass down on the daily? Especially until you get your feet under you?
I get why "partner who came along for the ride" might be tasked with such things if your S.O. has various other responsibilities, but if such efforts are weighing on you like this and your S.O. might be able to take them on ... why not? Surely there is a fair exchange to be made for taking this on? It sounds like you're past the point of "this is a learning experience" and well into overwhelm. To me, this logistical shit sounds like stuff that might suck even if you were a local or a native-language speaker of your new geography. Maybe you just need some help with that shit, and it's okay to ask!
If this is not your S.O.'s jam and you're able to communicate in a reasonable way with your relatives in your new place, can you enlist their help? Perhaps asking/enlisting them for advice could be a meaningful way of connecting with them, and of building the long-term experiences that tie people together, regardless of where they're from. People love to be experts in their own shit. Invite your Euro-side folks to advise and participate. Let them show off!
Now, a story.
Ten years ago, I moved from Texas to California with my husband for Good Reasons. He sought out a job on the coast because his mother was ill; he is an only child and we needed to step up to be present for her. I was happy to leave my job, too. Trump was on the horizon when we signed our lease in the East Bay in October 2016, but didn't seem likely to win. SPOILER: that mf did, in fact, win. I spent my election-night November birthday crying alone in my Texas shed with a bottle of bubbles, impossibly sad that I was about to leave My People, even though I knew I was moving to a ~ supposedly better ~ place. We packed up the pets and moved to the Bay Area weeks later, and I spent the next two years trying to make friends with people who I felt didn't get me or my angle on life. Many were kind, smart, thoughtful folks who had never lived in a Hard Place. Many more were kind, smart, thoughtful folks who had lived in Hard Places and chosen a somewhat easier place. (California is still a problem, don't @ me.) It was awful and lonely and it made me feel so angry and useless and WHO WAS I SUPPOSED TO TELL ABOUT IT? MY BEST OLD-TIME SOULFRIENDS IN RED-ASS TEXAS, ENDURING THE BRUNT OF THE FUCKERY? lolsobNO.
You don't say what took you to your S.O.'s European geography, but it doesn't sound like you would have gone there on your own. I felt much the same as you describe, in California — grateful to be in a nominally safer place, but not a place I would have chosen.
You sound like a fighter to me. An action-items person. I'm that way, too. So I gave myself the advice that I'm about to give you. Your mileage may extremely vary, but I approached my days (after a couple of months of full-on sulking) as an anthropological project, seeking to make my California life tolerable and, at times, even enjoyable and productive. After some effort — it took a full year of feeling like I would be alone and sad forever — I found a great goddamned job working for abortion rights that I might never have gotten in Texas, which changed the whole trajectory of my career. Bonus: Said job came with the best-friendship of a woman I am certain I never would have met without my family's weird sojourn to the West Coast. I wouldn't trade our friendship for the world, but my goodness! It came at the cost of feeling like I was fucking over my back-home people for my own unearned comfort.
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So here's what I did in California: I identified the shit I cared about and poured my time into it any way I could. I volunteered for a California abortion fund. I gave workshops on self-managed abortion, spreading the word of how people in "red' states had fought against abortion bans and had abortions on their own terms regardless of the law. I joined up with lefty political groups, making calls for candidates in my home state and writing get-out-the-vote postcards, even though it felt TRULY GODDAMNED GROSS to be mailing letters to my former neighbors as if they'd never heard of voting. As if they didn't know what to fuckin' do to improve their lives. But it was something. Many expats may be glad to have their former home in the rearview, but I suspect when you seek out folks in a similar situation to you, you'll find some of your people, too. That's what happened to me; I met some cool-ass displaced Texans doing remote advocacy, people who understood why I felt so weird about everything. Not because they were trying to fit into their new place, but because they were trying to advocate for their old place. Together with my fellow transplanted Texans, we connected with great California people, too, and shared those friendships with each other like we were passing around high-value Pokémon cards.
After a couple of years, I was lucky to be able to move back to Texas, a place run by some of the certified worst people on earth, people who are hell-bent on making life a misery for all of us but especially marginalized folks. And yet, this is a geography in which I thrive, because I love to fuck some shit up and I relish the privilege of doing so.
If you're like me, being in a comfortable place might not be for you, even if you hold vulnerable or marginalized identities. If you have a tolerance for adversity, I invite you to embrace that, and find ways you can mobilize those skills and impulses to benefit people back home, even if you can't or don't want to move back. Don't fall in with the expats who are glad to be rid of the U.S.; find people who give real big fuck about making the U.S. better, even from afar. Maybe you'll still be listening to to, idk, "Rock Me Amadeus" on hold with the electric company. But you won't be so far removed from the struggles of your people (fucking with bills and bureaucracy sucks everywhere). And I bet you'll feel better knowing you're doing what you can, from wherever you are. — Andrea
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