A shared universe › Blog › Starting from scratch in another country · Español
Some people leave Spain with a suitcase and a six-month contract; others arrive in Spain with a suitcase and an acquaintance’s phone number. The stories are very different, but anyone who starts from scratch in another country knows the same mixture: excitement, exhaustion, paperwork, a language that resists you and a homesickness that appears when you least expect it.
The psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui, a professor at the University of Barcelona, describes emigration as a grief with seven losses: family and friends, language, culture, land, the place one had in society, contact with one’s own people and, in the hardest cases, physical safety.
It is a special kind of grief. What has been lost has not died: it is still there, you can go back for a visit, you can phone. That is why it reopens again and again, with each journey and each piece of news from home. It is one of those griefs nobody sees, because from the outside it looks as if the person has gained something, not lost it.
When conditions are very harsh, with enforced separation from family, fear, a sense of failure and the daily struggle to survive, Achotegui speaks of “Ulysses syndrome”. He makes clear that he does not regard it as a mental illness but as very intense stress in the face of extreme circumstances.
The Canadian psychologist John Berry, of Queen’s University in Kingston, proposed a well-known model for understanding how someone arriving in another country adapts. According to him, everything hangs on the answers to two questions. Do I want to keep my language, my customs, my way of being? Do I want to mix with the people here and be part of this? From the answers come four paths:
Berry also proposed speaking of “acculturative stress” instead of culture shock. With that change of words he wanted us to look at adaptation as we look at any other stress: something that wears you down, that says nothing bad about the person going through it and that can be faced.
In a large international study, Berry and his colleagues Jean Phinney, David Sam and Paul Vedder asked 5,366 young immigrants aged 13 to 18 living in thirteen countries. Those who moved between the two cultures, their family’s and the new country’s, were doing best, both in their mood and in their daily lives. Those who felt lost between the two, belonging to neither, were doing worst.
A review of 83 studies with more than twenty-three thousand people, by Angela-MinhTu Nguyen and Verónica Benet-Martínez, now at Pompeu Fabra University, reached something similar: having two cultures is associated with better adaptation than holding on to just one. It dismantles the old idea that someone who lives between two worlds is doomed to belong to neither.
With one qualification: it doesn’t depend only on the person who arrives. Berry stresses that the society that receives them counts too. Integrating is far harder where doors are closed to you.
Homesickness will come, sometimes with a smell or a song. In Galicia they call it “morriña”. It isn’t a sign that you made a mistake: it is what we feel for what we love.
If you left Spain to study or work, it may weigh on you to watch life at home carry on without you: the birthdays, the births, parents growing older. And the return, if it comes, has its share of grief too: some people come back after years and take a while to feel at home again.
If you came to Spain, on top of the language (in some regions, two), the paperwork, work and housing, there is often the weight of what those who stayed behind expect of you. Going to the social services at your town hall, to an association or to a neighbour you trust is not a defeat: it is using the support that exists for exactly this.
The other half of integration is done by the people who are already here. Learning someone’s name and pronouncing it properly, asking about their country, inviting them for a coffee, helping with a bureaucratic task or greeting them every morning. They are small gestures for the person making them and can be enormous for someone who has just arrived. Sometimes the kindness of a stranger is the first thing that makes someone feel at home.
If the sadness, sleeplessness or tiredness don’t go away with the weeks, or if you feel you can’t go on, talk to a doctor. In Spain, the health centre is the way in, including for talking about your mood. And don’t keep it to yourself. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
In A shared universe nobody asks where you come from. You can light a star with “What I’m grateful for” for the neighbour who gave you a hand in your first week, or “For someone” who stayed behind at home. Whoever reads it, wherever they are, can keep it company.