I can expand upon this for others if it might make it a little easier to understand. When I was a kid in Australia a Lebanese friend I went to school with taught me a phrase when I asked if he missed his home. There's a an Arabic or Persian word "Qarib" which means near or familiar and "Gharib" means strange or stranger and the difference in the two is often imperceptible even to native speakers in both how they're written and pronounced. I don't remember the actual phrase now and I'm sure there's multiple but it's a play on words that conveys the meaning of feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, somewhere you never felt out of place before. Longing to return home only to go and find out the longing doesn't leave. I always got the gist of what he meant but I never internalized it until I moved to the United States. I know both where I came from and where I ended up are shitty anglo empires built on the backs of genocide and I'm not here to defend the nationalism or nations themselves, that's entirely missing the point and I'd be the last person to appeal to patsoc shit.
The point I'm trying to make is the place you grew up, the place you call home even if it's through gritted teeth and seething venom, there'll be a time when you sit and realize what you left there isn't there any more. Those memories will always be in the past and they're as distant as a lost loved one. You can remember them so clearly, almost feel their echo or smell them but you can't quite ever touch them again. You're never quite "From here" in your new home, and the home you left will never come back. I still wake up over a decade later having trouble sleeping without hearing the waves. Without being able to smell sugarcane and rainforest and ocean. The stars are different. The bugs sound wrong. The sky is too closed in.
There's nothing left in my home town for me, and there won't ever be again, but I'll never belong here either. I will always be Australian in ways that the material reality I grew up in shaped and formed thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences that will impact all kinds of things. People will never not see me as Australian either. Americans have made that exceptionally clear to me in good and bad ways but both in spades. I didn't end up a commie until after moving to the states so I can promise "in what way it impacts you" is really up to the person, but the 'flavor' of them will always be shaped by those memories and that sense of longing for something you left but know isn't waiting for you if you return.
I know this isn't a unique experience in the slightest, I've shared this conversation with friends I've made in the states from Syria, from Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, China, Trinidad, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Nepal, and they all know exactly what I mean seconds into the conversation. I understand a lot of this is still a really privileged position in the first place, especially as a white guy from a settler colonial shithole built in an invaded paradise, but it's one of the few ways in which I can ALMOST understand what it's like to feel displaced, not to compare them in scale but to be able to more easily put myself in the shoes of others and START to understand the stronger version of this they go through.
It's this that makes me feel like if you have any possibility to travel when you're young especially, do it. Leave just go where-ever the fuck else you can and see as much of the world as you're able. Meet people and try and understand the world through their eyes. Actually put yourself into the world and lose pieces of you while gaining new ones from your new experiences. Reminisce and introspect. See the world through as many other eyes as you can until you're as far away from being relatable to the anglo empire that indoctrinated you from birth that you can be. You'll forever feel that loss but that pinprick of pain will do wonders to inoculate you from closing your heart to all those you meet that the empire would otherwise have indoctrinated you to be unable to relate to. You'll always be a shitty American or a shitty Australian or whatever else but you'll also never be those things again. Not like you were.
I'm sorry if this felt dismissive of anyone who went through these feelings without having had the option of doing it as their choice. I didn't mean to bring up complex feelings or feel like my relatively privileged international move was in any way comparable, I just wanted to illustrate the best I could that it's a complex difficult thing for people who have never experienced these things, even when you don't feel like it is at the time. Even when it's just a friendly jaunt around the world it will change you forever. I would only bet far more so when the trip isn't so friendly and of your own will. Nothing but love for you all. Never stop trying to be internationalists.
I can expand upon this for others if it might make it a little easier to understand. When I was a kid in Australia a Lebanese friend I went to school with taught me a phrase when I asked if he missed his home. There's a an Arabic or Persian word "Qarib" which means near or familiar and "Gharib" means strange or stranger and the difference in the two is often imperceptible even to native speakers in both how they're written and pronounced. I don't remember the actual phrase now and I'm sure there's multiple but it's a play on words that conveys the meaning of feeling like a stranger in a familiar place, somewhere you never felt out of place before. Longing to return home only to go and find out the longing doesn't leave. I always got the gist of what he meant but I never internalized it until I moved to the United States. I know both where I came from and where I ended up are shitty anglo empires built on the backs of genocide and I'm not here to defend the nationalism or nations themselves, that's entirely missing the point and I'd be the last person to appeal to patsoc shit.
The point I'm trying to make is the place you grew up, the place you call home even if it's through gritted teeth and seething venom, there'll be a time when you sit and realize what you left there isn't there any more. Those memories will always be in the past and they're as distant as a lost loved one. You can remember them so clearly, almost feel their echo or smell them but you can't quite ever touch them again. You're never quite "From here" in your new home, and the home you left will never come back. I still wake up over a decade later having trouble sleeping without hearing the waves. Without being able to smell sugarcane and rainforest and ocean. The stars are different. The bugs sound wrong. The sky is too closed in.
There's nothing left in my home town for me, and there won't ever be again, but I'll never belong here either. I will always be Australian in ways that the material reality I grew up in shaped and formed thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences that will impact all kinds of things. People will never not see me as Australian either. Americans have made that exceptionally clear to me in good and bad ways but both in spades. I didn't end up a commie until after moving to the states so I can promise "in what way it impacts you" is really up to the person, but the 'flavor' of them will always be shaped by those memories and that sense of longing for something you left but know isn't waiting for you if you return.
I know this isn't a unique experience in the slightest, I've shared this conversation with friends I've made in the states from Syria, from Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, China, Trinidad, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Nepal, and they all know exactly what I mean seconds into the conversation. I understand a lot of this is still a really privileged position in the first place, especially as a white guy from a settler colonial shithole built in an invaded paradise, but it's one of the few ways in which I can ALMOST understand what it's like to feel displaced, not to compare them in scale but to be able to more easily put myself in the shoes of others and START to understand the stronger version of this they go through.
It's this that makes me feel like if you have any possibility to travel when you're young especially, do it. Leave just go where-ever the fuck else you can and see as much of the world as you're able. Meet people and try and understand the world through their eyes. Actually put yourself into the world and lose pieces of you while gaining new ones from your new experiences. Reminisce and introspect. See the world through as many other eyes as you can until you're as far away from being relatable to the anglo empire that indoctrinated you from birth that you can be. You'll forever feel that loss but that pinprick of pain will do wonders to inoculate you from closing your heart to all those you meet that the empire would otherwise have indoctrinated you to be unable to relate to. You'll always be a shitty American or a shitty Australian or whatever else but you'll also never be those things again. Not like you were.
I'm sorry if this felt dismissive of anyone who went through these feelings without having had the option of doing it as their choice. I didn't mean to bring up complex feelings or feel like my relatively privileged international move was in any way comparable, I just wanted to illustrate the best I could that it's a complex difficult thing for people who have never experienced these things, even when you don't feel like it is at the time. Even when it's just a friendly jaunt around the world it will change you forever. I would only bet far more so when the trip isn't so friendly and of your own will. Nothing but love for you all. Never stop trying to be internationalists.
That's beautiful, thank you