Rootlessness - 02

At the beginning, once I arrived in Madrid, visiting home happened frequently. On the one hand, the distance was not that much and, on the other hand, I could economically afford it thanks to the discount for residents on the plane tickets and also because I had easily found a job (through friends). Stepping into the emptiness was not as bad as it could have been.

Those visits were not aimed to disconnect from Madrid's hustle and bustle, I was far from feeling the chronic stress of the big city. Its aim was meeting my family, understanding by family both my partner, who was still residing there, and the family core in which I grew up. They also helped to release, tear after tear, in the intimacy of the relationship, the anxiety caused by having moved to the unfriendly environment Madrid was to me and the lack of the everyday affection I was used to while living in Tenerife.

With the passing of time the frequency of those visits was reduced, in part, because the emotional disrupt they meant, both before and after my partner moved to live with me; in part, because I had integrated, adapted to, or assimilated what living in the capital meant. However, that integration was not full, the links which made me yearn for my home, my land, were never broken. Those links left me with the sense of guilt, the feeling of having abandoned a family which needed me more than I needed my new life.

The proudness I saw in my parents eyes for having started to build a promising future and the satisfaction it meant for them that so many years supporting my degree had finally a reward, were translated inside me into a feeling of treason. I felt that it was time for me to help them and instead of that I was in Madrid seeing how every day it was more and more difficult to go back, to end an experience that although never lost its temporal nature, I carried on postponing year after year.

It is not that Madrid satisfied me completely, I never had that feeling. I felt professionally tied down. The salary I earned there was unthinkable for the Canaries and the incentive the career progression meant became a mice trap, the farther I went into that dynamic the less possibilities I had to go back.

rootlessness - 01

The other day I wrote that I could not blame anybody for me to be here, that I was the one who took that decision. When the noise around me was so unbearable that I could not focus on my writing anymore, I decided to give up and read through what I had written. I gave to it a second thought. Cannot I really blame anybody? It is not that I was looking for somebody to blame for me to be where and how I am. What I was thinking of was if it was really a free decision. I think it was not, or at least that is the point to which I arrived. At the following day, while I was doing some research on the Internet, I found an article in a psychology web page which pointed in the same direction.

Migrants use to assume that it has been them who, as an act of freedom, have taken the decision to package their belongings and look for a new future away from the family environment. But that act of gathering the needed courage and starting a new life is not as a voluntary act as it looks like.

Why on earth would somebody leave their homeland, the warmth of the family, the plans of a local future, in other words, everything that is left behind; if it was not their intention and had the chance to grove a professional future in that familial environment?

What migrants assume as a voluntary act is, in reality, a forced decision; the gathered braveness to start the definitive step, is not such a thing, it is pure resignation, it is closing the eyes and stepping forward into the emptiness, not knowing how long it will take until crashing into the ground.

So, the reason of my move was not my on initiative but the lack of a sufficient market, one adequate to the needs of a over-skilled population. And definitely it was not a act of courage. While it was not a necessity, despite having been a personal objective, I did not gather enough courage to leave my environment, to try my luck, to go in search of a promising future.

It was, simply, the impossibility to carry out those dreams I had started to build. A family, a house and a vegetable garden were the unreachable objectives, the forcibly-postponed plans and, for years, the consolation, the justification of a imaginarily voluntary exile.