Post-sauna rejuvenation in Östhammar, Sweden (photo by Gustaf Georg Lindström)
All my life, I’ve wanted to emigrate. Strange goal for a child, perhaps, but I was precocious–and deeply unhappy. The adults in my life, in any case, always responded the same way: “You can’t run away from your problems.”
What they said was of course true. That is why my evening tonight began with a therapy session and concluded with a seven kilometre stint on the treadmill. Mental health, after all, is a garden that requires constant upkeep: therapeutic watering, spiritual pruning, cognitive-behavioural weed-whacking. It’s hard work, and there is no AstroTurf. (Just ask Voltaire.)
With that said, making a big move can be an important piece of the psychological puzzle. And I maintain that immigrating to the UK, as I had always dreamed, was a very big piece indeed, as I am now more stable, happy, and functional than I’ve ever been.
There are many reasons for this, but I will try to review a few in this post.
Packing for the big move (photo by me, of course)
Consider the following tweet from @boywaif: “I had a French [sic] professor who once said if you just did something like going to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and categories [sic] you would go crazy with pure sense and joy.”
What a correct–and devastatingly French–observation. The problem is, it’s difficult to remove “the goggles of habit” (great phrase) when everything around you is so very, painfully familiar. Make that double when you’re a stubbornly routine-oriented person.
You see, when you become married to your own habits and preferences, sometimes the best thing is a hard reset. You can’t, for example, have your favourite breakfast cereal–the same one that you’ve eaten every morning for twenty years–in a country that strictly regulates food that is high in sugar. Similarly, you can’t shop at the same grocery store, eat at the same restaurants, nor visit the same doctor.
In this new environment, you must rebuild and adapt. There is no choice. While there are admittedly some Americans who break rather than make at this critical juncture, others, like me, find themselves experiencing unprecedented personal growth.
Edinburgh Castle (photo by me)
Besides, foreign countries have a sheen of unfamiliarity that lends charm to even the most mundane of moments. When I walk down the street, for example, I hear small children speaking in a thick Scottish brogue. I see double-decker buses chuffing along their usual route. I smell Greggs’ fabled sausage rolls. All of this, even years after moving to the UK, delights me.
This applies to the less mundane aspects of foreign life, too. Here in the UK, particularly Scotland, the landscapes are arrestingly beautiful. (Seriously, google Holyrood Park.) The architecture, too, is impressive, and not uncommonly several hundreds of years old. Just down the street from me, for example, a mediaeval castle sits atop a craggy volcanic rock. I don’t think I will ever get used to seeing that on my (unfortunately frequent) walks to the dentist.
Life here, to put it simply, is an adventure. It is an adventure when I perform small errands, like the time my first COVID-19 jab was performed by an Irish woman called Carmel. (Carmel! What a name!) Equally, it’s an adventure when my husband and I take trips to historical locations like York, the city that gave its name to the state I was born in.
I concede that this “pure sense and joy” will one day lose its lustre. “Home blindness”, to one extent or another, is inevitable. But even if it does, that’s okay. The majesty and wonder–hell, even the flaws–of the UK pulled me (and sometimes jolted me) out of a very deep slump in my twenties. For that, I will always associate it with the good, and that association–rather than a short-term sense of novelty–is what I suspect will last.
If you’re considering emigrating, and are fortunate enough to have found a reasonably affordable route to do so (as I did), consider taking the plunge. Granted, it’s a risky move. But if your proverbial garden is overrun with the coarse bracken of complacency and ennui, it may behove you to forge a new path. ◈
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