Member-only story
How living abroad has made me prouder of my national identity
Statistics show over 6 million non-British nationals were living in the UK as of December 2019. Seemingly, people are now more flexible in adapting to a new country’s living standards, culture and social dynamics. But figures fail to reveal the individual relationships immigrants have with their home- and host-countries respectively and how these relationships change with the experience of living abroad.
I am Romanian-born and UK-based, the latter due to an overwhelming feeling of not belonging, which I felt for years when I used to live back home. For me, staying in my home country was never an option. You might think it was because of corruption, or our faulty economy, or any other prejudice surrounding immigrants from stigmatised countries.
But it was not. In my case, those flaws in the Romanian internal affairs were just secondary reasons for my leaving the country. Many people have chosen to stay home in spite of those things and succeeded in finding happiness there regardless. And I would have too, had it not been for this self-defining emotion that I had to go, I had to be somewhere else and build my life there.
At the beginning, living in the UK showed me that I had been right all along. I was in awe at how easily I adapted, how welcoming it all was, how safe and peaceful I was…
