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An Expatriate's Account of the meaning of HOME
Dedicated to all of us who ever felt alone in the world... Wishing you a pleasant homecoming.
06-04-2009
Expatriate
Dear Expatriate,
This brand new blog should count for you. It is a place of communication on a worthy level. Look at the questions below. They concern people who have gone through the overwhelming experience of leaving their homeland. Who knew adaptation to a new land and customs would be so demanding!
If you care to join me in describing this experience, we could form a ring of recognition.
My main concern is: how has your break with your homeland affected you?
If you find any question below that applies to you and that you wish to respond to I will respond to you. Please mark the number of the question.
Expatriates until now have, to my knowledge, not found a forum for the hardships this adaptation caused them. Everyone dealt with the experience silently, behind closed doors.
Questions such as 'what do we want after all, or, what is left now that life has changed so drastically, and that the dreams of the past have gone or have come about?', need to be verbalized if not they hold an invisible power over us. In this blog, I hope we may be surprised to find internal experiences just like our own, when we thought we were so isolated.
Being an expatriate is a difficult undertaking. I hope you can share some capsule moments of your personal development here.
Your synthesized story or feelings will be powerful, and serve as a support to everyone.
Your experience will not be in vain, lost somewhere like a message in a bottle in an open sea.
This blog may be your anchor.
You have a quality of experience that has transformed you, in fact to the greater good of civilization.
Please share your story.
I appreciate your participation.
Greta
1: Have you ever left your homeland and never returned?
2: Where did you at first land?
3: How long ago did you leave?
4: Did you leave with the intent of breaking away?
5: Were you obliged to leave?
6: How long did you stay away from your homeland without returning? How long in total?
7: What were your first impressions of your new country of adoption?
8: How many years did you continue the experiment of breaking away from your roots?
9: In how far did you succeed adopting foreign ways? Did your partner as well? Do you feel a rift now due each other's different ability to take in a new culture?
10: How did you like to adapt to a different culture? Were you reluctant to change? Or did you instead embrace this different culture with open arms?
11: Did you participate in the country's concerns, such as take political sides, Parent Teacher Associations, any benevolent cause or cultural activity?
12: Did the new friends you made remain your lasting friends?
13: Did you long often and deeply for your homeland? Did it withhold you from adapting, from integrating?
14: What in specific did you long for in your deepest feelings?
15: Were you able to achieve your goal? What was the goal you had set to achieve?
16: Did you overcome many difficulties in order to achieve this goal? Describe them in brief.
17: Did the experience of adapting to different norms transform you?
18: How did this transformation affect your relationship with your loved ones in the home country?
19: Did you return to the homeland for reasons of longing?
20: How long did your longing last before you were able to overcome and accept the new world of your choice? Did it ever happen?
21: Did you give up and return to the homeland disillusioned?
22: How did your loved ones react to you during your return visits?
23: How they did accept you back in their circle once you returned for good to your homeland?
24: If you returned for good, do you long for the land you left?
25: Do you wish to return to that land, no matter what the sacrifices?
26: What is your relationship with your aging parents? Do you have emotional independence from them? Do they accept your decisions? Are they upset?
27: Have you left grown children behind in order to return to your homeland? Are you a student separated by your studies from your land?
28: Did your children understand your duality and let you go?
29: Is the need to be with your children/grandchildren so great that you will adjust to or remain in the foreign country, even if you long for your homeland? How do you cope? Does your daughter or son respect your attachments?
30: What is the meaning of 'home' to you? Is it a house, or a much broader concept?
31: Has the concept of 'home' changed since you adapted to your new country?
32: Did you have psychological assistance in order to adjust?
33: Did your mind transform along the way? Did you become less shy? Or perhaps more introverted?
34: Do you regret the process of maturation or accept your transformation with open arms?
35: Would you exchange your choices with those of your peers who stayed behind? Do you still hold on to the friendship, and meet them regularly? Do you feel different from them? Might a new 'incompatibility' issue describe it?
36: Can you, do you have a desire to still integrate with them? Or do you prefer to watch them act, to look on?
37: Do you see a ravine between your former life and now? Do you have any desire to bridge it again? Or do you prefer the new frame of mind?
38: Did you formulate along the way what is essential?
39: Did the concept 'survival' ever cross your mind?
40: Did you learn the language of your new country of adoption? Why? In order to survive the experience, or out of interest?
41: Are you more deeply lonely and isolated, even if your life is going well, either in the old country or in the new?
42: If you wish you could break with it all, what would you do right now?
43: Are your emotional needs satisfied or do you want to break away?
44: Did your parents love you? Describe the strength and the way of their love.
45: Did you leave out of ambition to prove your worth to them?
46: If you did, does your present success in life allow you to return and enjoy your homeland? Return for good or for visits?
47: How did the family in the homeland react to your success? Describe the degrees of their empathy.
48: Are you proud of your family and tell tales about your homeland experiences in your adoptive land?
49: How do people react to your sharing habits from your unusual or strange country? Do people love your stories? Are they open for (your) different culture as you are for theirs? Are they enjoying, accepting, rejecting or just bearing your experience of a world they do not know? How do you react to obtuse attitudes about what is important to you?
50: Are you made to feel like the ugly duckling in either land?
51: How do you manage feelings of isolation, or an inevitable sense of abandonment?
52: Were you the black sheep in your family? In your school? Is that why you left?
53: Did your 'midlife crisis' or any other crisis lead to a transformation? At what age was your crisis? Did it give you emotional insight? If so, did it have to do with your adoption of your new country?
54: Were you able to deal with life's challenges before you left? Are you able to deal with them now?
55: When you meet/met compatriots in the new country, do you cater to them happily, as if they represented home? Would you act as a stranger? Would you act in the traditional manner at your former home?
56: Would your children follow you if you were to return? Or would it be a clash of two different cultures?
57: Do you approve of the ways your children differ from you? Do you have empathy for their difficulties in accepting your duality? Do you understand the difficulties with which a first generation will or is able to integrate with their own country of origin, your new country??
58: Do you allow for their search for balance? Do you enjoy/regret this difference?
59: What do you think of 'Globalisation'? What does it mean to you in particular?
60: Have you learned to respect other cultures by way of your adaptation process?
61: Would you have been able to respect other cultures without such transforming experience?
62: Describe your transforming experience.
63: Do you beleive yourself beautiful or handsome? Are you a man, a woman?
64: Do you find that beauty is important? How did beauty impact your life?
65: How spellbinding is beauty in your life? Do you live for beauty? Is it in your periferal vision? Does your new country supply you with sources of beauty? Which ones?
66: How has your new country influenced you to turn to art? To express yourself? As a tourist? As a connoisseur in the making?
67: Do you ever feel greedy about starting the day?
68: Did you catch on to the computerized life? In time not to miss out on your (grand)children's development? Do you love the new age of interaction and technique?
69: Do you enjoy being 'with it?' How are you 'with it'? Do you do this effort for yourself or your kids?
70: Describe your most beautiful moment or and your deepest fulfillment.
71: Describe your greatest wish.
72: Describe your deepest shame, your second deepest, your third. How do you cope with self loathing or self punishment in recalling your gaffes?
73: Did you learn to be humorous?
74: Do you enjoy people's love? How do you react? Are you affectionate?
75: Exercise is difficult. How do you get your systems up and running?
76: Do you complain a lot about your health?
77: Do you secretly wish you could be a healthy person?
78: Do you think you are overdoing it? Do others? Are you willing to change?
79: Is the wall too high to achieve that goal?
80: Do you love animals? How does their loyalty affect you? Their death? Are you able to create their affection for you?
81: If you ever hurt an animal or a human being, was it due to helpless frustration towards your situation in your new country?
82: How can you deal with mourning this aggression?
84: How do you deal with mourning the aggressions of others?
85: How do you deal with your parents' decline, being so far away? How do you deal with their passing away in view of your long absence from them?
86: Would you take in your parents, or a surviving parent, into your home to be with them or care for them in your new country?
87: What are the consequences of such an action?
88: Do you enjoy (looking back on) your education? Do you believe 'smart' is sexy?
89: Do you follow adult education? Are you interested in everything?
90: What are your favorite 'hobbies'? Do you realize that you might want to make your true life's calling out of them? Is it practically possible?
91: As far as the kids: does the apple fall close to the tree? Did you do a great job? Did the kids leave? Do they visit you often, as you would visit your parents back
home?
92: Do you and they retain the mother/fatherland's language or break away with the new? Can you keep up?
93: How important, how deep is your attachment to your own language, to your cultural enrichment? Can you feel this enrichment when learning other languages?
94: Do you take pride in your ability to speak different languages? How would you describe the ability to understand and to speak the language of different cultures?
95: In speaking the new language(s), do you feel a sense of belonging to a greater world?
96: How does this change affect you? What can you do now that wasn't available before?
97: Is your ambition restrained in your new land, or on the contrary given wide birth, even under difficult circumstances ( as described for example in the book by
Deborah Rodriguez: 'The hairdresser from Kabul')?
98: What would you like your transformation to achieve? Are you liberated? Do you think you are a leader or a follower? Where do you want to go from here?
99: What would you hope this blog would achieve? Am I missing an important something here that I ought to include?
100: Do you believe that unity amongst nations is a grand and wonderful new development? Do you smile just imagining it? Do you think now of all those people you
know of different cultures whom you want to include in your happiness?
Your contribution is precious; Thank you. Until soon. Be well
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