It feels like I haven't written a post in a while and so, today I have decided that it was time to sit down and jot down a few thoughts. I have to warn you; this is another one of those melancholic posts where I share with you everything that goes through my mind.
Said that, I want to start by telling you that Brussels looks beautiful in autumn. Thanks to the gorgeous weather so far (this was true until yesterday, this morning it's raining!!) I have started walking home almost everyday, taking pictures of every little detail that catches my eye. Brussels usually looks very grey and dull but the autumn colours makes it very solemn and cheerful at the same time. I think the architecture and the buildings are given a new life with the red, the yellow and the orange of the leaves. The new season has really helped me see Brussels under a different light.
I had a few busy weeks; work, friends and innumerable attempts to organise my life better. My cousin and her family came to Brussels to visit a friend last weekend and we spent the all Saturday together. It was lovely. We never have the chance to spend so much time together. First because there is (actually I think there was) a big age gap that of course affects the relationship we could have and second, we now live too far apart. Saturday was good because we finally realised that I grew up (thank God!) and that we now have more of a common ground to build our relationship on. We definitely have more things to talk about, discuss and share. It was also very nice to be with family, being able to feel comfortable without making an effort and just be myself.
Then, I have reached the third month of my time here and it is a moment for decisions. I have to choose my next adventure and as every, single time my heart drives me both home and far from home. I want to work in London because that's where I see myself in the future, I know that is the place where I will settle down for real. Therefore, my rational side thinks that it is the time to go there and work on my career and my future plans, but my irrational side thinks that I am still very young and I have plenty of time to explore the world and see what else it has to offer. I believe, though, that this moving around is somehow counterproductive, we all reach a moment in life when travelling and changing countries is very enriching on the personal level but so limiting careerwise. What I mean is that once we find our career path it is better to stick to one place in order to build the right network and put down the foundations. So this brings around one first question, if my first job experience has been in Belgium should I better stay here then? But do I want to stay here? This is the second question. Since I don't think I would like to live here for long maybe it would be better to go before it is too late. And where to? If I go to London, I will be closer to home and ready to build my real life, the life I want for myself but then, I think of all the places I will not know, explore and become familiar with, all the wonderful people that I could meet and I won't meet. In choosing my next destination I use this criterion; I believe that Europe is a bit too stuck in the past and that places like Russia or Australia are moving fast towards the future. This means that I could probably find a job outside Europe but in my head I make an exception for the UK, which has an incredible ability to adapt to the changes this time is bringing and so I am back to London. You might think I have already found the answer but it is not true. My best skill is to never be content with my choices: if I chose London I will wonder what it would have been like to live somewhere else and if I chose somewhere else I will wonder whether London would have been a better option.
On this note, and also because of recent events, I have started remembering my childhood and mentally listing the reasons why I am the person I am. I grew up in Italy and yet when I have to name my home I say: UK. I am a curious and a bit restless person. Maybe restless is not the right word, but what I mean is that since I was little I wanted to travel. I remember that when I used to play I pretended to speak English. I couldn't but I wished. I admired my father so much because he could speak English and he had worked in the US, in Canada and in Africa. I listened, mouth-opened, to his stories and anecdotes about the time he landed in Kinshasa or the time he haggled the price of some souvenirs with a Nigerian man who was selling his goods in the shade of a banana tree. In the mind of a little girl that sounded so exotic, like the adventures of Sandokan. I wanted to be like my father; I wanted to work abroad and see men selling their things in a market in Lagos.
I never liked the place where I grew up. It is a city, by Italian standards, one of the centres of the 'industrial triangle' (as the Italians call it), with a long and rich history and proud people, but I hated it. I found my city suffocating, stuck in the past and far away from whatever the real life was. I had the strong belief that something exceptionally interesting was going on somewhere else and I wanted to be part of it. My favourite subjects at school were English, history and literature (not so much geography, funny for someone who wants to travel so much). English was clearly because of my father's influence, history because it made possible for me to know more about other countries' past and culture and literature because I could travel with books and on the pages of some of my favourite stories I could find someone like me, someone that was impossible to find among my peers.
I had friends and my closest friend comes from that period. She is like a sister to me, she was the only one who could understand. Probably we are not very similar but we understand each other and this is all we need in life. Others did not even make an effort to understand me, or at least that was how I felt back then. The result was that I put all my energy in trying to be different. When I reached secondary school I chose to study languages. I knew that speaking more languages was the only thing that could take me out of there. I chose Russian, and not because I thought it was useful. I didn't know much about Russia or Russian economy to realise that someday that might have opened some doors. I just wanted to be different. All the proper, well bred girls were doing French or German and if you wanted to be more alternative you would have done Spanish (yes, the city is so backwards that Spanish is alternative!!) but I wanted to be more alternative, I wanted to be against the system and be labelled Communist; I wanted to speak Russian.
People were amazed and they didn't know what I was doing. My family is part of that well-bred class of people in the city and so I was the 'weirdo'! Maybe it was all my father's fault marrying a Milanese, who knows! I fell in love with Russian but I didn't like my secondary school years. I had plenty of clashes with the teachers who wanted me to study hundreds of Latin words by heart and couldn't teach us how to put two sentences together in English. They wanted us to know all about Italian literature and so miss all the great literature the world has to offer. I refused to study what I thought was not useful and I remember how I was the only one once to tell my teacher, by whom we were all terrified, that I hadn't read the great Italian novel 'I Malavoglia' by Verga simply because I couldn't understand it and I didn't see the point of reading something I couldn't understand just because someone told me to do so. I think that is the problem of that city; people always do something because other people has told them to do so. People dress the same because other people told them that is the acceptable way of dressing. People go to that bar because other people told them to go etc. Since I didn't agree with what people told me to do I was 'strange', strange just because I wanted to think with my head.
It was hard, terribly hard to grow up there. It is hard for a teenager not being accepted and feeling such an outsider. When we are teenagers we need our group of friends to feel accepted but I didn't have a group of friends, I had one friend who I have to thank for making those years bearable. I wanted so badly to be accepted but at the same time I didn't want to give up my personality. I wanted to be able to express myself and I couldn't understand why everyone was making that so difficult. I wished I was different, I wished I could be like the others, believe me, but I wasn't.
By the time I was fifteen I figured out that the only way was to leave. I couldn't find a place for my dreams, my ambitions and my interests where I was and the only way to save myself was to go. I went to England and Ireland to improve and finally be able to speak English. It was hard, people were different from me, from my culture and my mentality but I am stubborn and I don't give up easily so I went to study abroad. When I was eighteen I left my city and what I was familiar to me in the search for my place in the world. I found it but I say this again, it wasn't easy, even if I hated what I left it was still all I was used to.
This explains more or less why I left but it doesn't explain why I didn't stay. Sometimes I think about how easy my life would be if I was just like the majority of the people I met throughout my childhood. They are happy where they are, they don't wonder about what happens outside their comfort zone and they don't go through hard times just to find out. Maybe I left to create opportunities for myself, but it is not that people there don't have opportunities, they have universities, jobs and a standard of living high enough to allow them to explore a bit more. Despite all this, I went and most of them stayed. It is not that I am more clever or capable of those people. I believe many people there are smarter than I am but yet they don't appear interested in exploring and discovering just to see if there is something better somewhere else. You can always come back but I reckon it is worth a look.
Now, I think I found myself or at least I feel closer to that point. I know who I am now and what I am capable of. Sometimes I doubt it, like everyone does, but I know now where to find the strength to go on. I thought that once I had found myself I could have come back and be happy where I used to be but that is not the case. The people that used to know me now see me too tough and too ruthless. They act like they don't know me anymore. I am sorry but I am not tough or ruthless I am exactly like I was, the same person. It is just that when you find yourself in a new environment, usually with people that know each other already you have to toughen yourself up a bit, you need to learn how to be respected and you have to get people to know you as quickly as you can otherwise you will end up alone. This involves learning how to speak your mind, making sure that everyone knows what you like and what you don't. It is easy when you live in a place where everyone knows you to be respected but when you are unfamiliar with the culture and the people surrounding you, or when you are the only foreigner, the migrant you need to find a force inside you that will help to cope with all that is unknown. Sometimes you are the only one who can protect yourself and so you need to be stronger. Sometimes I pretend I am stronger than I actually feel because I am afraid that people will take advantage of me. I have to guard what I really am because people can damage that. If people don't recognise me anymore it is because the person they knew was a scared teenager desperately to find a place to stand. Now that I have found it and I am happy with who I am I am not scared anymore and I am free to share with you who I truly am that is exactly who I was but couldn't show.
Sorry about the long rant, perhaps now you know me a little better. I want to leave you with some pictures of Brussels. You can see how beautiful it looks these days. Good night everyone (and next time I will tell you all about my trip to the hammam)!!
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