The emotional turbulence of living abroad

I am writing this while sitting on a plane en route from Dublin to Amsterdam. We have dipped above the cloud line, and the muddy green tinge of the Irish coastline has already been devoured by the mist. This flight is barely half full, and I am surrounded by empty seats. I therefore allow myself the luxury of a little cry as I watch the fog scrape the windows, while also trying to avoid the eyes of the cabin crew. I imagine 19-year-old me sitting in the vacant seat next to me, and I feel her judgment and surprise. Why is her 25-year-old self crying on a plane?

When I moved to the Netherlands six years ago, I was lucky enough not to feel very homesick. While some of my fellow international students would talk of the crushing ache that they felt on a daily basis, I felt mostly liberated by the newness of it all. The freshness of living in a different country, of discovering new interests and people, was intoxicating. When I would fly back to Ireland during those first few years, Utrecht would tug me back impatiently like a puppy dragging its owner to the park. Of course, it wasn’t all rosy, and there were plenty of days when I longed for familiarity. But overall, I was swept up by this new flow, and this flow suited me just fine.

A couple of years ago, however, I started to feel an undercurrent of doubt. My bubble was somewhat broken after I graduated from my Bachelor's programme, when my social circle was redrawn as friends moved away. I became more familiar with the Dutch rental crisis as I stumbled between sublets and the-landlord-doesn’t-know-that-I’m-staying-here situations. I began to daydream of Ireland more frequently, and realised that although I went back for visits a few times a year, I had not really experienced what it was like to live as a young adult in my birth country. And for whatever reason, that twinged a bit.

The irony is that Ireland is a difficult place to live in for many students and young professionals. Emigration rates of young people from Ireland have steadily risen in the past ten years, with the blame falling on stressors such as a high cost of living and a monstrous housing crisis. Although the Netherlands has its own plethora of issues, living here is, in many ways, easier for me than it is to live in Ireland. If or when I do move back, I would really need to consider the financial and practical implications of doing so. 

This is the emotional paradox of living abroad. I am, of course, privileged to live here, but the experience is accompanied by a psychological riptide. I see it sometimes as having two cardboard cutouts of myself, one in each country, each cut slightly differently. Some days this feels normal, and on others it feels like crying on an airplane.