It is our third full day in our new city, Copenhagen. We live on a street that I understand is considered “posh”. I mean, as posh as anything can be considered in Denmark where everything looks quite out of a home design magazine to me. Over the past days we have explored at least four different parks in our vicinity and we are aware that we have not even seen half of the city’s amazing greenery. Everything is lush, green, well kept and wild at the same time, the city is clean to a fault, there is so much to enjoy I wonder if we will get enough time in our lifetime to do it.
On only our first afternoon here I found myself telling my partner that I feel like I had taken a quantum leap, several generations ahead, development-wise. What amazes us at every step (well preserved and cherished nature, well organized recycling, smooth traffic, relaxed people) seems to be the norm around here and I am again convinced that the hardest transition will be the one happening within.
I know it is very early to look at these feelings but today I feel foreign, less then, I feel like an intruder. I know where I come from and I look at everything around me like at a gift I don’t really feel that I deserve (I mean, these people have worked all of their lives to get here and I am just coming in to reap the benefits?) and which might be taken away from me at any moment.
Moving countries, homes, is one of the biggest human stressors. Starting a new job, another one. Raising a teenager, an added bonus to all of this. And still the part that I look to with the most anxiety is myself. I cannot possibly complete my transition without looking a the stories I carry with me wherever I go and deciding which ones fit in this new place and which ones I need to let go of. Easier said than done, of course.
After only three days in our new (empty) apartment and a country we so wish we will be able to call our own soon, I have brought stories of internalized homophobia and racism, of us being less because we are from Eastern Europe, of us being outcasts because we are two women, of me bringing in less value at work because I am new and of a different background. On a conscious level, I realize which stories have to go and why. Subconsciously though I realize I am going to need a lot of help because, especially in stressful situations, the path well known is what we default to most times.
In one of the podcasts I listened to daily before I left Romania, The One You Feed, the host, Eric Zimmer, frequently brings to the forefront one of his most favorite sayings: don’t think your way into the right action, act your way into the right thinking. In other words, changing our ideas through our actions. I am making the intention to do that as much as possible every day. This way, maybe, one day, our inside will catch up with our outside and take the same quantum leap.
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