By Nate
The earth is in complete chaos, as the 2010’s come to an end countries worldwide start to recover from what we soon learn to be mearly the first wave of the covid pandemic. Nonetheless, there you are standing at the airport, two large suitcases in hand filled with only the essentials of course, fully committed to embark on a new chapter of your life. A part of you is happy that it is leaving the broken yet loving home that caused you so much pain and hurt behind, yet another part of you knows that that home only wanted the best for you and for you to be ready for the world that was so unknown to you at the time, you just didn’t know it yet.
As the process of checking all the necessary documents, depositing luggage, and getting food comes to an end your mother starts to realise that theres not much more postponing she can do and that it is time to say goodbye, she tries to hold back her tears but it was of no use. Before you leave she tells you the same story you’ve heard so many times already leading up to this moment.
But somehow, as cliché as it might sound the part where she says ‘no matter where you end up in life, never forget who you are and where you came from’ never left your thoughts. Your dad tries to keep it cool but for him its all still to real. You cant help but shed a tear yourself because regardless of all that happened you were still saying goodbye to the people who raised you and spent the past 18 years of your life by your side.
The next thing you know the sound of 2 general electric ge90’s roars in your ear as you look outside the window at the evening sky filled with big voluminous clouds colored orange by the setting sun. you see the white sandy beaches that people would pay thousands of euros just to experience but you would go to every other weekend with your family. It couldn’t have been more picture perfect. You watch your small island and the culture you took for granted at the time slowly fade away in the distance.
9 hours later you touchdown in one of the busiest airports in Europe. As you enter the arrivals hall you have to give yourself a minute to take it all in, you have travelled to places before but never have you seen this many people in such a large open space before with so much movement. You feel like the main character in a movie yet so insignificant at the same time its like you’re experiencing all the cliches you only see in movies, ‘I smell opportunity in the air ‘ or ‘being part of something bigger’ type stuff.
Slowly but surely you start to find your groove and start discovering what its like to have free will, not without its challenges however. You start learning that temperatures can change more than 4 degrees throughout the year, you experience natural cold, snow, ice, hail, and fog for the first time in your life and you slowly get to know new people and discover all the good but also the weird and less nice things about them and their culture. It slowly makes you realize that you are in fact different. And at the time this made you feel like you didn’t belong, In almost every room you stand in you feel like you are the odd one out.
You try your best to participate and sniff some culture as they would say but even in environments where you are all in the same stage in life you still don’t really feel like you are a part of it all which is logical to some extent since you are missing the crucial experiences and upbringing that brought them together in the first place, even in such an unknown environment. This trait can be one of the most unifying yet at the same time the most dividing force of a culture.
You won’t ever be told it directly but in the smaller interactions you have you definitely feel it. In those moments you feel like there is no one who can truly understand what you’re going through, sometimes people will even laugh at you because of how different the experiences you had growing up are from theirs, the way you handle situations, deal with problems, show friendship, say hello, feel emotions and just who you are is different. you want nothing more than to be back at home with people who can relate to you on so many more levels and have experienced the same things as you have, you start to wonder why you left it all behind and what you are even doing in this place.
At such a young (adult) age it can be hard to accept that you don’t actually have to fit in at all, and you kinda just have to create your own mold to fit in to. especially in such a big country you have to look hard enough to find people who share the same experiences as you and know what its like being the odd one out. Somehow somewhere along the way these friends you make made you realize that Being different is not a disadvantage but it’s what makes you different from the rest, I know it sounds stupid but you can finally see it as something positive. You also learn that we all have worries and that the same people you felt excluded from sometimes were feeling the exact same as you and were having the same struggles just on different fronts without you knowing.
Even after all this some challenges still remain to be faced, you’ve changed so much, and haven’t been home in so long, what will they think of you when you’re back?, what will your grandma think of your hair and your newfound style?, how do you tell them that you might not live up to your culture’s expectations of sexuality? will they judge you? Will you feel like an outsider now in your own country? All this stuff still really weighs you down quite a lot and sometimes it takes up so much of your mental space at random moments of the day and the answers are all still so unclear.
However on a random day somewhere in 2021 a pivoting point in your life here occurred when one of the few true friends you made said the words ‘hey I have my first intap tomorrow you should stop by and watch me pour beer’ and ever since that moment you felt like there was a small chance things might turn out ok after all. If you made it this far thanks for reading my story haha I wrote this short little string of text while my hyperfocus was being yoinked by a video of someone recording a landing in curacao from their airplane window which really brought me back to the moment I left for the Netherlands. I wont lie in the moment it made me feel quite emotional so I decided to try and write my emotions and how I was feeling in those moments in text. While I was writing I realized that I am most definitely not the only one who has experienced something like this in their lives so i hope that reading this gave you something to relate to.
Ps I noticed while writing that I left a lot of stories from my time here in the Netherlands and also feel like im not painting the full picture yet so I might write a longer story like this with more detailed experiences sometime, could be funny lol anyways thanks for reading bye 🙂 -Nate