Caught in the trap...

December is the last month of the year, and we start with changes and new challenges, my smile and happiness when doing what I love “Has no value”, these last 6 months of this 2023, my life has changed inexplicably for the better, I am in a safe place, sheltered in one of my passions writing and reading at home.

Place that has always been my therapy, from there fighting for my dreams so that they do not stay in just words that the wind takes them away, I have by habit and good habit to write everything I think, and feel.

A Decalogue of everything you are supposed to "do" appears every day to be successful when emigrating inside or outside your country.

It bores me a little, I confess, for example, “to speak without a foreign accent if it is outside the country or with a different dialect when it is inside it”, that makes integration difficult, to maintain my customs at all costs, without the "I must not" to do not forget my root". Also, a lot of people are willing to tell you that if you don't do that, you will fail irretrievably. Assuming that the idea of failure, is a universal idea.

Then our mind creates one of the most dangerous traps for us: we confuse our individual goals about what we want to "Be" with expectations about what we "Should do" in our destination country, or in our other city within the same country in order to be integrated. As someone who claims that integration is a goal in itself.

We even create success criteria, before having the migration experience.

We could end up doing everything we were told and still feel dissatisfaction, quasi-permanent nostalgia, a feeling of being inadequate.

Caught in the trap, we could even confuse all these feelings with what we call homesick grief migratory or justify everything we feel by telling ourselves that this is the "struggle" that immigrants must wage to achieve "success".

Integration is a means when you emigrate and the success criterion is very personal because only everyone knows it. These supposed indicators of success when emigrating carry a lot of anguish and frustration. You have to be very very very careful about it.

If you want to succeed, you have to earn it, and that also implies being willing to fail, at least that's how it happens to me, the more I make mistakes, I get up, shake my knees keep going, over and over again, until I achieve what I set out to do.

In 2010, around this time, I was preparing my return from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic to Venezuela. Some people think that return is a form of failure in the migration project. In that preparation, I wrote a little piece of paper with the five things I wanted to achieve in my country. Almost three years later, when I was making boxes to go from one city to another within the same country for work reasons, I miraculously found the little piece of paper. I didn't write: I want to buy a house, or I want to have a new car, nor did I write, I want an office for my then company.

It was magical. Crumpled up as the little piece of paper was, he came to tell me that what I wanted to be in my country of origin, I had achieved. Venezuela, in the midst of its crisis, had given me the stage to be what I wanted to be.

I keep my little piece of paper as a reminder that what I want to Be wherever I go is my biggest indicator of success, and it's unique, but you have to be disciplined.

Nothing more to add, but to reflect on this message. And work on our big dreams. So, sooner rather than later, our dreams will come true.

I invite you to write yours...

Janitze.