"Foreigner" is just a feeling
What you are going to read is just a really short part of my thoughts about this topic, but I had to synthesize as much as possible. It talks about my experiences and what I realized in one year. I hope it will transmit you the same passion I felt while writing it. In my opinion "foreigner" hasn't a negative undertone, it involves everything's different apparently, but after a while it will reveal its inner similarity to what we already know, it's a kind of resource for us.
One year ago. Less than one year ago my first adventure abroad began. Alone. What at the beginning seemed to me a dangerous choice, within few days became the best decision I've ever made in my life. Prague was the destination, thanks to an exchange organized by the Youth in Action Program. That was just the first of a long series, the beginning of a great vicious circle: I spent October and November in Szczecin, in Poland, through the association AIESEC University, and in the meantime I moved to Warsaw and Berlin; in the end, one week ago I came from my one month trip in London at the EF School. At the time of my departure I didn’t know what was waiting for me, where I would have been, who would have welcomed me and how I would be able to integrate; but when I had to come back to Italy a feeling of inner sadness came over me, given by the melancholy of having to leave that great country, those amazing people and that comfortable environment which had been my daily life for more than one month. There I had the perception of being at home, I knew exactly where to go, which road to take, to turn around that corner, almost as if in a previous life I had spent decades among those avenues and between those lighted trails. I hadn’t the feeling of being a "foreigner" anymore, and perhaps I got the same across people around me, to the point that often happened that real English men and women came close to ask information, a banal gesture that made me really enthusiastic. On the morning of my flight back, I had that sensation more than ever: which "home" I'm going to if I am already at home?! It seems illogical, crazy and foolish. How can you expect to own a city in such a short period? Yet the welcome and integration sense that I had from the beginning was so obvious that it can’t be denied, absorbed in a multiculturalism that works as a stirring incitement toward who already has the desire to know and to discover new cultures, new traditions and new habits. Now I’m aware that relationships’ survival doesn’t need neither every-day meeting or every-day calling, nor people coming from the same background, since the dozens of friends I met abroad are still part of my life, despite the time goes on; that shows how much the noun “foreign” has lost its substance in a world dominated by globalization, in economy, in finance, but in unparalleled relationships too, where we are all equal and we are all different at the same time, it doesn’t matter where you are from and where you grow up, because everyone’s endowed with something beautiful and interesting which deserves to be shared, in spite of time and distance, now weak and overcome easily.
Honestly I’ve never had to face the culture shock, but I had to deal with what psychologists call reverse culture shock when, coming back to Italy, I didn’t feel to belong it anymore. The circumstance of having to move to another country, because mine doesn’t give us enough opportunities for personal and working development, is a usual topic to me, because we are all aware of the current situation in Italy, but I must admit that it doesn’t scare me, and maybe, even if here I had the opportunity to show how much I'm worth I would prefer to leave the country, because the concept of unpredictability and the immense wealth that a staying abroad can offer is one of the most beautiful experiences that everyone should have the right and the duty to live, because getting up in the morning, thousands of miles away from your home, looking out the window of your flat in East London and rolling up your sleeves looking for your future, trying to built it how you want and where you want, is an important opportunity for growth, and making your own what at first you didn’t know is one of the most exciting challenges of our lives.
In 2014 diversity should be regarded as wealth, as treasure; there are no more boundaries, limits and restrictions that prevent us "foreigners" in a foreign country from becoming an essential part of lives’ plot. Difficulties we deal with, prejudices, which are everywhere and always will exist, should represent a incentive to show how is exciting the comparison with what is "different". Unlike what we might think, we should consider ourselves lucky, maybe we should thank the new communication’s means and the ability to reach a different continent in few hours flight, we may thank ourselves, today youngers, belonging to a generation that I would like to call "without borders", our resourcefulness and initiative. Beyond the various reasons that lead us to seek our place in the world away from our homeland, the conclusion doesn’t change: there is no longer the concept of "foreigner" as interpreted by our ancestors, there are no more those insurmountable cultural and social differences that acted as the backdrop in previous decades; the world, and in particular I mean advanced nations, is cosmopolitan; every European capital, not to go too far, is brought into life thanks to the fabric made by individuals from many different parts of the globe, which intersects every day more and more, like pieces of a puzzle coexisting to become complementary, while maintaining their various shapes and their different colors.
The key word is sharing: sharing ideas, opinions, traditions, sharing habits, preferences, cultures, and last but not least, the extraordinary ability that each of us possesses to discover, learn and make our own life-style different from that one to which we’ve been accustomed since childhood. That’s the main difference between behaving as a tourist and being a traveler, between going for sightseeing among monuments and attractions that guides suggest us on one hand, or spending our days putting down that damned map, getting lost in the maze of the city and making it your own, on the other hand. That 's what makes us citizens of the world! Home isn’t where you were born and where you spent your childhood; home is where you feel yourself, and if in your home country you can’t be at ease, whether in your village or in your town you’ll always have the impression of being scrutinized by prying and judgmental eyes, that's where you're foreigner, stranger among known faces, but still a stranger, and despite the language you speak is the same as those who are close to you, you seem to be surrounded by people speaking an incomprehensible dialect of unknown origin. Stranger is the one who survives stuck in a microcosm to which doesn’t belong anymore.