When I think about how long I have known my closest friends and how we reached the point where we genuinely enjoy and trust one another, the answer is sometimes decades. Countless parties, trips together, years of slowly getting to know each other. Sometimes even a few years turns out not to have been enough. So perhaps we should not expect deep friendships to appear within the first two or three years of life abroad.
Loneliness can hurt, of course. But it also carries an advantage that can be difficult to see through the tears of long, overly quiet evenings: reflection.
Reflection is often the beginning of change. A flash of wisdom. A seed that grows when we keep thinking. Moments of reflection deserve our attention because they can bring deep understanding. Knowledge does not always make us happier — sometimes ignorance really does feel easier — but I believe that knowing ourselves and the world around us has an enormous power to clear away what no longer serves us.
And that can create an extraordinary sense of freedom.
To put it practically, nothing prevents us from maintaining pre-emigration friendships in the virtual world. Yet distance often becomes the first very effective filter. Some relationships simply do not survive it.
Sometimes that reveals that a friendship was maintained more by habit, momentum or circumstance than by genuine closeness.
As the number of people around us becomes smaller, the amount of time available for reflection grows. And with reflection come questions. Our values begin to become clearer and harder to bend.
When bending our own values starts to feel like hypocrisy, we question more. Even relationships that survived the first test of distance can begin to pass through a second filter.
Perhaps someone refuses to understand why you emigrated and sees your decision as irrational, yet still calls — almost as if to reassure themselves that you really are the one who has lost perspective.
After another round of filtering, you may find yourself with even more time. You can sit in it and grieve your loneliness, or you can begin to appreciate the time you have unexpectedly been given for yourself.
The freedom opening in front of you can be frightening. You may wonder whether perhaps you really have lost your mind. So, for reassurance, you hold on to the remaining pieces of your old social world.
But once the process of change has begun, it can be difficult to reverse. More and more often, one question appears: why?
Why do I keep in touch with people after whose calls I feel worse? Why do I keep reaching out when a relationship feels toxic because it takes more than it gives? Honest answers to those questions can take months or even years.
The Last Filter
But when the answer finally comes, the gates to freedom open a little wider.
Some relationships fall through the final sieve quickly. Others take longer. Sometimes we have to shake the sieve for quite a while before we see clearly what remains.
In the end, perhaps only what is nourishing and genuinely valuable is left.
So is loneliness in emigration really loneliness — or can it also become freedom? Are we losing something? Or are we learning to feed ourselves only with what is truly good for us?