THIS WEEK, strangely, I was asked a few times about how things are "going" and if I was not homesick, if I was not thinking of going home.
Saudade is a feeling present in me every day, at various times. And it is only normal missing everything when you walk away from all the people who have been part of your daily life for years. You suddenly need to make new friends and raise a new family no matter where you decide to live. This is not always easy and it is never comfortable.
When people ask me, “Am I not homesick?”, I think a lot about the attitude they hope I should take. It is clear that those who do not live this situation cannot so easily empathize with me, because this experience is unknown, the constant feeling of missing out is unknown. And we cannot know what the other is feeling if we have never felt the same.
I always say yes, I am homesick. And my answer stops there. What can I do about it? There is not much to do. I will not be crying all day for the lack that life in Santos makes me, I will not take the first plane and go home, I will not go into depression.
We Brazilians are very heartfelt. We are passion. We are heat.
But in these situations, we have to be very cold. Very cold. And it contrasts with our nature.
Because there is much more than longing.
There is planning, there is the effort to get here, there is the investment, there is the after, there is having started all of this.
There are the two years I spent planning and thinking in possibilities to come here, and another 8 months of preparation to send the application to universities, there are the first six months of the master's degree that I sweated a lot to finish, there is all the money thought and saved, there is the question about what I'm going to do if I return (unemployed for almost a year and without a master's degree it doesn't seem like a good option). It has my own pride in starting and finishing something that I set out to do. If I return home, will I have a job in the area I want?
We can very well drop everything, get on a plane and go home, if we are unhappy. But I'm not unhappy, I'm just homesick.
Every day when I walk around the city and see the old style houses, I feel a huge gratitude to be here!
It wouldn't be easy and I knew it. But I never wanted it easy. I always wanted to test myself.
I'm lucky to have a family here, and this family to be wonderful. Although they are not dad, mom, sister and friends, they are the cousins / brothers that we all have, and they make my whole process less complicated.
Homesickness is not sadness, it is a state of mind.
After all, “only those who love each other in Portuguese feel saudade”
