Porcupine's wisdom

What do you become when you end up living in 4 different countries for many years in each of them?

What kind of identity do you create, having being immersed in various cultures, languages and walks of life?

Is it a massive valuable experience or a very difficult life road, where one ends questioning one’s own identity, sanity and peace of mind?

It was at the age of nineteen that I landed during a warm summer day in Brussels, Belgium. I wasn’t an immigrant but travelled on a student visa to do my studies in French. I had no clear goal in front of me, I was just grasping the opportunity to do something interesting with my life. Having been born in Russia and having lived there for 19 years, I was curious about the rest of the world, and especially about the French speaking world, as the French language was my passion. I wanted to see Europe, explore and looked it as an adventure.

After five years in Brussels, where I completed a bachelor and a master, I got a bursary for another master in Amsterdam. I was so naïve then, thinking that it was all more or less the same, after all the Netherlands was a neighboring country, and I thought that the move would be easy. How mistaken I was! It was a world apart, not worse, but just totally different, speaking in a language I didn’t know, with other culture and totally different interaction among people. Still I stayed seven years in Amsterdam, learning to speak Dutch, becoming Dutch, integrating into the society. It was there that I got my first psychosis – maybe it was too much for me? Changing the countries, learning new subjects, changing radically my career? After all, with the diploma in languages, I ended up working as a financial analyst of banks and a portfolio manager – probably not the best choice for my character and personality, although the company I worked for was superb.

From Amsterdam I moved back to Brussels, abandoning a PhD bursary at the University of Amsterdam, going instead for a short spell as a headhunter at a very nice company in Brussels. I missed the city so much, that any job was good, as long as I could move back. I loved Belgium with all my heart! But I got unwell again and ended up in England, in Sheffield, with a psychosis in a psychiatric hospital, from which I emerged happy and refreshed because my short staying in the hospital showed how friendly and amazing English people are. I got another PhD bursary at Sheffield Hallam University, and stayed in Sheffield eleven years in total, getting a PhD, creating a family, working as a lecturer, making amazing friends.

But Sheffield didn’t last because I wanted a more stable job to be able to raise my son and once I was offered a position in a Dutch city, in Leeuwarden, I hesitated at first but then decided to give it a go. And so, more than three years ago, we moved to Friesland, and build our lives here at this moment.

Personally I think that I should stop moving, unless within the same country. Changing a country of residence is extremely hard, and almost impossible when you are over forty, with a child, and in a fragile mental health. I have to watch out for psychoses for the rest of my life. This is what uncertainty and starting over leads to – the mental barrier in your brain simply can’t cope with so many changes.

However, I don’t really regret my massive experience gained after living in four different countries. I speak four languages, I encountered so many interesting people, I have friends all over the world, and I have an out-box-thinking attitude towards life. Integrating into different cultures, taught me the wonders of this world, and gave me a unique perspective to understand deep level of human psyche.

It has been a marvelous, albeit, very difficult experience. My identity has changed. I can’t really associate myself with any particular culture and feel like I am a true global trotter, a European citizen, with an open perspective towards life.

But when I left Russia at the age of 19 I was crying. I kind of predicted that I would become what the French call ‘unracine’, meaning a person without roots. I became unrooted. This feeling will change once I integrate more in the place I am currently living, but it will aways be there. I miss different parts from all countries and places where I lived. I miss the deep thinking of Russian people, I miss the Belgian ‘joie de vivre’, I miss the picturesque view of the Amsterdam city, and I miss Sheffield, where I had built a whole life, its hills and amazing nature.

But I will tell you more about my international experiences in the next posts.