Migration; an unspoken, vulnerable journey
I left Venezuela 19 years ago. It’s been only a couple of days since I started processing the repercussions of having left my country that long ago. You might wonder, ‘why did it take her almost 20 years to process a decision she made so long ago?’ Well, sometimes it takes that long to process trauma. Yes, migration can be a trauma. It’s a very different experience than travelling by choice to explore different parts of the world and then deciding to settle somewhere else because you want to experience a different lyfestyle. Sometimes people who need to flee their country do it because they don’t have any other choice. If they don’t have the means to grow and expand in their native land, it’s because it’s not provided there for them. They start considering seeking that expansion somewhere else. It’s also part of their soul’s journey and life’s purpose to leave behind what doesn’t serve them, and pave the way for a better life, even if it means leaving their relatives and all they knew up until then, behind.
Venezuela, despite being a beautiful country, it’s full of corruption, scarcity, and danger. When I left, it wasn’t as bad to live there as it is today. I’m thankful that I live in a safe place now. I’m still processing the loss of unrooting myself from the place that gave me life, at the same time that I decide where I want to spend the next decade of my life. This can be a difficult process because it brings up feelings of not belonging and always seeking for a place to call home. I have resistance to keep growing roots in just one place and I still have this need for finding the place with all the best conditions to settle for when I grow old. What I’ve learnt is that no place is perfect and it’s the people and the community you build what really matters. This is what keeps me attached to Bristol. The energy of this city is incredibly healing, and the community I am part of, balances off the terrible English weather , which is why I want to move again. Being from Venezuela, I need the sun in my life and Bristol cannot offer me that. Now I feel it’s my time to move again but I am too attached and my life is good here. There’s pros and cons for everything and I find it hard to leave for good.
Leaving your homeland can feel like this, a lonely empty road ahead but promising…
I left Caracas, my native city, on the 1st of October 2005. I was 20 years old. I flew across the Atlantic Ocean to Madrid with many dreams and hopes but full of grief. The direct flight lasted 8h from city to city and I cried the whole time. I cried because I knew deep inside that I was never coming back. For holidays yes, for sure, but never to live there again. I have the image of my parents and siblings seeing me through the window when I was going through the security check and me turning back to see them every time I could. They didn’t leave that window until I had passed the security check and we couldn’t see each other anymore. From that moment, I started crying. I cried almost every day for the next three years. The grief was massive. The cultural shock was massive. The language, despite being Spanish, had a very different slang which I did not understand. I experienced racism in the first few jobs I had and it wasn’t until I fully adapted to the Spanish culture, around five years later, that I started to feel integrated, and slowly accepted that I would never live in Venezuela again. Around year three of always crying, a friend of mine said: “Yhonet, you either accept that you left or you go back, but you can’t carry on like that”. It was after that moment that I accepted that I had left and stopped crying so often. I opened myself to the possibility of creating a new version of myself. The Spanish Yhonet I got to be whilst I lived in Madrid. With years of living in different cities I realised I can develop different personalities depending on the city where I live and the language that I speak. Even if it’s the same language, speaking Venezuelan Spanish brings up different personality traits that didn’t show up when I spoke Spanish from Spain. The slang changed, the swearing changed! So the Spanish Yhonet was different from the Venezuelan Yhonet. I obviously integrated them both to a level where I felt comfortable with myself, but to be really integrated in the Spanish culture, I had to let go of my Venezuelan slang so people could understand me. I obviously wasn’t consciously aware I was doing that. It was a coping mechanism that we all develop eventually when we integrate into a new culture. I have become aware of this as the years have passed.
My mum came to visit me three times, one of them with my father. I remember crying with them because we couldn’t be together all the time. They asked me if I wanted to go back and said that I would always be welcomed if I did. I said no..
After a few weeks together, they went back to Venezuela and I carried on with my busy life. I was always studying and working full time. I had really little time to live but somehow I managed to visit many cities and towns in Spain and I made many friends that felt like family. After eight years in Madrid and noticing that my opportunities for growth and expansion weren’t coming to me anymore, I decided to migrate again. This time I chose Bristol, England. The place that called me, adopted me and conquered my heart.
Bristol has a big piece of my heart and it’s the place where I most feel at home
Bristol was a complete life change for the best. The energy of this city is magical and very expansive. It’s full of creatives and it offers lots of opportunities to unlock the creativity within. Soon after I arrived, I found a job, dedicated myself to work full time and started my process of healing by doing therapy. It was the first time I had decided to start doing therapy and look within. I quickly started meeting the people that I created community with. We’ve all moved to Bristol around the same time, and we’re all still here, so we’re family to each other. My first community was with latin people. For the first time since I left Venezuela, I started relating with Venezuelan people again and other countries from South America. That was the first time I started to reconcile with the latin part of me that I had pushed down and suppressed in order to adapt to a new culture.
I integrated very well in the English culture, and though at the beginning I found it difficult to make friends with native English people, once I did, they have become the greatest lasting friendships I’ve ever had. I fell in love with Bristol and all the things it had to offer. It was here when I first started to hear the inner call to play music, something I always loved but never considered I would end up doing. I remember making the choice of taking singing lessons over doing a course to become a teaching assistant. What a great choice that was. I really listened to my heart that time. And so the time passed and I have been in Bristol for ten years. A decade of my life! It’s half the time I spent in Venezuela. I feel very Bristolian now. The ‘English way’ it’s very ingrained in my DNA and I find it really hard to leave a place where I’ve grown so many roots.
During these ten years, I took a year break to go back to Venezuela and take care of my mother, who sadly transcended from a brain tumour that took her life. That loss made me realise that I didn’t enjoyed my mom’s last ten years of her life because I was away. Her time to leave this Earth came and I wasn’t ready for that. Nobody can ever prepare you to lose a parent, really. It’s something that will inevitably happen at some point of anybody’s life but the pain of that loss cannot be compared to anything, at least for me. So after a year there, I came back to England and spent the last eight years really busy, doing a degree, a masters and then working as a teacher. It wasn’t until last year that I decided to quit my job and give myself a break to live life, to rest, and to let go of this hyper achieving mentality that I developed to cope with grief. Now that I have been unemployed for almost a year, it’s the first time that I’m facing the feelings of what it means to be a migrant and the uncertainty that comes with not knowing what my real place in the world is.
Mum and I on her last visit to Spain. Granada, 2010
Mum and Dad came together to visit me in Madrid for the first time since I left. Madrid, 2010
I decided to leave England in November 2023 to spend the winter in another place of Europe that was warmer and sunnier. Me being from Venezuela, the winters in England are one of the most difficult things I’ve ever dealt with to sustain the balance of my mental health. I feel depressive over the winter months because the lack of light really takes its toll on me. I know it affects most people, even people that have been born and bred here, but I have Caribbean blood and grew up in tropical weather. Before moving to Europe, I had never seen snow. The dark and the cold hits me really hard and makes me wanna escape this land, to never come back. So I moved to the South of France to escape the winter in England, experience a different culture and evaluate whether that would be the next place I would settle in. After five months there, struggling to find decent jobs and always living in survival mode, I decided to come back to Bristol. I needed to come back to sort my things out, take care of my cat and decide whether Marseille was the right place for me to start a new life. I recently went there for a job interview and got a job, which is very badly paid despite requiring qualified skills. Now the choice comes: do I want to take that job and move there? Do I continue my life in Bristol, where it is easier to expand because I already know what it’s like?
This question brings up many feelings. A feeling of not knowing what is best for me. A feeling of uncertainty for the future. A feeling of questioning my worth as I don’t really want to work in a job that pays so badly just as the way to integrate into the culture. But most importantly, it has brought up the feelings that made me write this post because for the first time in my life, I have become aware that I have unprocessed trauma from being a migrant, and I still don’t know where my place in the world is.
Whatever the decision I make, I know I will be ok because I can create a soul family wherever I go. I trust my inner guidance and I know what will be will be. Things fall into place by themselves.
I’m happy with the Sea in my life. Marseille, June 2024.
If you have experienced leaving your country out of need, seeking safety or a better quality of life, know that you’re not alone in the feelings that come with that decision. You have a community around you and talking or writing about the feelings that come with this is really important. I will soon create a support space for migrants, so they can express through creativity the challenges that come with adapting to a new culture.
I will leave with this question: what are the ways you use to sustain yourself to find feelings of belonging and adapting to a new culture?
Please share in the comments section and thank you for reading me!
With love, Yhonet