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.