Even though I have always identified myself as an immigrant in the UK, for a long time I have been half-consciously avoiding calling myself an emigrant. In relation to Poland, I considered myself a free spirit, an endless traveller. I didn’t fully discard the idea of coming back. After all, this was my home for over 25 years, and it remains a home for my friends and family. Last thing I wanted was to get excluded from it. And it felt like calling myself an emigrant would do just that: exclude me.
Arriving at a point when I feel comfortable and confident enough to call myself an emigrant took me a long while and was a rather confusing process. By the time I moved to Edinburgh for the second time (and stayed), existential and identity crises were no strangers to me. And yet this one did take me by surprise. God really knows why, since I always knew — and emphasised — that starting your life from scratch in different culture (no matter how well familiar with it you’ve previously become) is a bloody hard work. For all I know, I should have seen it coming.
But then again, in Sally Rooney’s words: “sometimes you live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position”.
The first wave of confusion came at the beginning of 2019. I remember feeling distinctly detached from both Poland and the UK. Homeless, in a sense: Scotland didn’t feel like a proper home yet, but Poland ceased to be one. When I posted something along those lines on instagram, a Scottish friend sent me a private message, saying she hopes I know I’d always be welcomed in Scotland. She probably doesn’t even remember that (we don’t speak much these days), but it really stuck with me. Later that year I knew I don’t want to come back to Poland and Scotland finally started feeling more like my place, like my home of choice.
Since then, a lot has happened: daftly misplaced affection, pandemic, first lockdown, love, relationship, work troubles, second lockdown. My life took a turn and I rolled into 2021 as a completely different person. Settled, confident, loved and with some plan.
One would think that this is it: easy life from now on. Well, not so fast.
The second wave of confusion came to me at the end of March, when I was forced to call impolite Polish bank (first time in some 4 years) and then got told off by my grandpa for ‘talking private’ on my blog (just because I wrote a post on menstruation). Two little things that opened a pandora box of negative thoughts and made me realise how very detached from Poland I’ve become and how very alien Polish mentality is to me now. It really feels like peeking into a completely different world!
At the end of last year I made a decision to intertwine my Polish blogging with English one throughout 2021. Just to see how I’d feel about. I’m over four months in now and I can see it’s been a way more monumental decision than I originally assumed. There is a reason why writing (and living) in English feels so much easier to me these days. It’s not just about the language, it’s about its audience too.
I start to feel like there is less and less listening (or reading?) space for me in Polish. I think I’ve been feeling that for quite a while now. Tiny little realisation creeped up on me unnoticeably: mum whispering about homosexuals on the phone and reminding me of lent (alien concept to me now, even though I used to lent every year until 7 or 8 years ago); brother picking up on the fact I started saying ours and we in relation to Scotland, and yours and you in relation to Poland; family members genuinely shocked I didn’t go back home when lockdown started; grandpa getting shocked by my blogpost I thought to be pretty light-hearted and universal.
Day by day, there seems to be less and less connection between my world over here and their world over there. It shouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, and yet it somehow does.
I understand my choices and their consequences. I know something is always for something else, and I couldn’t possibly have both. It’s natural that Scotland and my life here is replacing the life I used to know back there. And all in all, it’s a good thing. Less space there means more space here, where I really want to be. In my land of rainbows and unicorns.
But it’s hard. Unbelievably hard.
And no one really prepared me for this.
