There are many different kinds of war that we fight during our existance on this planet and just because some of them are referred to as such only metaphorically it doesn’t mean that they scar human beings less.

As an immigrant you fight battles every day. There are the battles that you fight with yourself, getting used to the new culture, language, way of life; you fight with yourself to open your mouth and say something beacuse you’ve already learned that the foreign accent coming out of your mouth when you speak generates all kinds of reactions, unfriendly looks being the least disturbing. You also fight battles with your family as the feeling of being ‘alien’ never really completely vanishes so anything can cause the family to lose their delicate balance. The moment you start feeling good about yourself   politicians sabotage that, throwing you under the bus full of blind and deaf, NHS and benefits deprived by you people, who accelerate when the politician on the upper deck screams ‘you have a green light!’ There are also the battles that you fight with those that you meet at work, in the institutions and so on… It can be really exhausting!

Sometimes you have to fight in the front lines and the imminent shellshock knocks you right down. Somehow you have to pull yourself together after that, pick up the pieces off the battlefield when you’d stepped on a landmine, reattach the limbs, give yourself a quick and crude brain surgery, as it usually suffers the hardest blow and let your corpse keep on figting the lost cause. I called it the lost cause for the simple reason that I’ve lost my faith in humankind.

Being an immigrant, I chose to work with other immigrants. I help them and their children settle in the new country when they arrive, I share with them my experience, paint a beatiful picture of their future, using a pallette of positive colours and try not to see too many parallels between us. It makes things less painful then. Before I go to work every single morning I ‘get all up in arms’ to fight yet another battle for ‘my kind’, a battle which doesn’t bring me any closer to winning the war against immigrants that has lasted for millennia. And so I’ve developed an immunity that helps me through the life that I’ve chosen for myself and my family, a thicker skin, a scarred skin that barely lets you see the person that I used to be.

So what am I still doing here?!

Well, since you’ve asked I feel obliged to answer. A few years back I thought I fought this war alone. A one woman army with mission impossible. I felt lonely and believed that no one else wanted to support a lost cause. I thought I was like a kamikaze, having been raised to sucrifice but to never surrender… Then it turned out that there are people who think a life of an immigrant is not worthless. Then they taught me to stand up for myself and others and fight my battles together in a group where we all have each others backs and I found some really good friends. Besides, I like fighting a just cause, even if it’s a lost one 🙂

Thank you all you wonderful people, who make my life so meaningful!!!