Minsk to Mist

A few days ago, I quitted smoking and vaping, putting an end to almost nine years of misery that terrible addiction brought upon me. While there’s still some work to go, such as an urge to chew on something (hellooo, carrot batons, you will be seeing me a lot in the next few days, yum-yum!), I can already relate to one of the affirmations we got from our smoke-quitting therapist. We undergo changes all the time, and it’s not bad.

We tend to get too fond of homeostasis, our stability and the way things function ‘normally’, and when something changes out of the blue (especially if it wasn’t our intention to alter anything), there is a tendency to feel dramatic about it. Yet, looking back at our lives, we have been going from one change to another all the time – graduating school or going to the uni (or, even more so, skipping one and starting your adult working life), changing flats, making new friends, meeting a new love, ending abusive relationships, taking up a new hobby, starting a new job. Regardless of what it is, one thing comes for sure – when there is a change, we say goodbye to something and welcome something else into our life.

Moving abroad results in a massive change in your personality. Whether you like it or not and whether you are ready or not, 5 years after your relocation, you will be entirely different.

Looking back at my journey, I see a few things that I didn’t quite expect to change, so losing or gaining this hit me the hardest.

Something lost:

• My hometown. Minsk is where I was born and raised, where I spent 29 years of my life, the place where I used to know every street and corner and could navigate with my eyes closed. Now, when I go there for a visit, I confuse street names, misjudge the distances (sometimes badly), get disorientated in the area I grew up in and, frankly, struggle to relate to it as my native city. There are certain places I like to visit, yet, a trip to Minsk feels like a trip elsewhere in the world – full of thrill of getting to know a new place. Except for the fact that you still can’t let go of the fact it used to be your home for decades.

• Ties to your former compatriots. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. The life in your native town or country goes on without you. People get new context, learn new things, worry about something that will never bother you in the slightest. And even if you come to visit now and then, the gap between your context and theirs just keeps growing. I have to ask my co-workers in Minsk about anything, from the most popular sort of sparkling wine up to what’s the new residential area in the city and why is it all the rage these days. I get shocked by how cost of living has gone up in Belarus, they no longer seem to bother even though they don’t have that much spare money anymore. They complain about the struggles of getting at least a one-off Schengen visa to travel to Europe, and I keep my mouth shut about how lucky I am to have one valid for another 3 years.

• Language ease. Even if you have mastered a foreign language, embraced the new culture and dream in English, that’s not the same as speaking your native language. There will be odd words and phrases you’d struggle to understand. There will be challenging accents and regional slang expressions that you never got to learn at school. There will be idioms that make zero sense even if someone kindly explains them to you. No matter how hard you try, when you fill in a questionnaire on the languages you speak, the difference between ‘proficiency’ and ‘native or bilingual’ is there for a reason.

Oh, and most of those jokes and memes in your native languages are either completely untranslatable or will fly over your new compatriots’ heads for other reasons. Pro tip – keep ties with your fellow native speakers, there will come a time when you are dying to share a funny meme in your language, and you need someone in your life who will appreciate it.

Something gained:

– Perspective. Having moved to a different country, I got a fantastic, almost intoxicating opportunity to fully revisit my life and take a look at it from a different viewpoint. I realised how many things that used to be a social norm in my native country were destructive, from overt aggression in public to bad habits such as smoking and/or vaping (everyone in the former Soviet Union knows these are bad for you, but, unlike in the UK, you aren’t considered to be a pariah if you smoke). Work-life balance gets a different perspective, and you no longer think it’s OK to work weekends and during your holiday, unless it’s absolutely necessary. You get to see a different way to handle confrontations, treat a cold, soldier through January (and doing it with a Dry January, no less!), speak to children, do the dishes, handle stress and loads of other things you used to do differently. It is as if you got to live a second life within your one and only lifetime!

 – Independence. Even if you haven’t lived with your family for a while before relocation, moving to a different country is the only way to get fully independent from your parents (at least while you are still lucky enough to have them alive). When your safety net is at least hundreds, if not thousands, miles away from you, they don’t speak the language of your new country and perhaps have never even been there, is when you have to face your day-to-day challenges all on your own and when you become genuinely self-reliant. And a grown-up, especially if your parents start freaking out about the difficulties you might be going through in your new country. My mum, for one, was sincerely worried if there were any grocery stores in London for me to buy food.

– Reset. Nobody knows who you are and what are your accolades and accomplishments from your previous country (and even if they learn about them, chances are, they won’t care, unless it’s a Nobel Prize or similar). Your qualifications hardly mean a thing. Your friends are either left behind in your old country or have moved elsewhere. Sounds terrifying, huh? Now think about the fact that the same applies to any mistakes you’ve made. Getting a degree that you didn’t really care about and just didn’t want your parents to get upset. A bad career choice. A relationship that should have remained in your pre-relocation era. Anything you hated in your own nation but had to maintain it to fit in. You get to start it all over. And it’s not a bad thing.

Any serious change takes a toll on our bodies and minds as they adjust and navigate the new reality. In the end, we tend to be grateful for those changes, no matter how painful they might have been in the process. Cultural adaptation is one of the manifestations of personal growth, which cannot be fully experienced without moving abroad. Don’t be scared of it. Embrace it as something not everyone gets to live through.