The Geography Of Becoming

Emigrate. That’s My Advice to You.

I want to tell you a story — not of one person, but of many, stitched together into a single voice. The voice of every quiet departure, every tear shed at midnight beside a packed suitcase, every young man or woman who once stood at the edge of the only world they’d known and chose to step into another.

Don’t hesitate to emigrate if you ever get the chance — even a fraction of it. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t wait until you have everything figured out. The life you're meant to live might not be here. And chances don’t knock twice.

Don’t look back, no matter the pull of nostalgia or the weight of family expectations. Love can wait. Guilt will fade. But time — time will not return.

Here, people walk with heavy eyes and hollow smiles. They’re strangers on the inside. You greet them every day, but you never really meet them. How can you, when they don’t even know who they are anymore?

I knew a boy named Idris — quiet, always sick, like the walls of his house had soaked the joy right out of him. His mother said he had a nervous stomach, something he inherited from his grandfather. But I knew better. He was being digested by this place. Every headline, every neighbor’s gaze, every rejection, every fake smile — it wore him down. By twenty-three, he had panic attacks daily. By twenty-five, he’d stopped dreaming.

Then one day, he left. Took the smallest scholarship offered to a small university in the cold north of Europe. Everyone warned him: “You’ll freeze. You’ll be alone. You’ll come running back.” But he didn’t. Two years later, he came back for a visit.

He looked… different. His eyes had light in them. His laugh came freely, not like something he had to remember how to do. His skin had color again, like someone had breathed life back into him. When I asked about his old illnesses, he smiled wide and said, “They didn’t cross the border with me.”

That’s what I want for you — to be someone whose light returns.

People will try to anchor you with stories of loyalty, of roots, of patriotism. They’ll tell you this country is your mother. That it raised you, that it fed you. But you’ll come to learn something: not every mother is kind. Not every home is safe. Sometimes, it is in another land that we find the version of ourselves we were always meant to be.

Whatever you think is enough reason to stay — your family, your memories, your childhood street — don’t let your heart trick you. Don’t let nostalgia dress up pain in warm colors. It wasn’t beautiful. It was merely familiar. And familiarity is not the same as love.

I’ve seen men in their forties emigrate and become new again — their blood pressure dropped, their voices deepened with calm, their shoulders finally free of the invisible hands always pulling them down. They weren't running away. They were returning to themselves.

This country — it’s no longer a soft embrace. It’s a rival you don’t want to destroy, but one you need to walk away from. Not because you hate it, but because you love yourself enough to seek oxygen.

If you leave, do it quietly. Don’t consult the fearful. Don’t announce it to people who will call your courage betrayal. Just leave. And when you go, don’t stop to stand on a hill and gaze at your village whispering, “My memories. My family. My pain. My ghosts.” They will not come with you.

And remember that one dog — the one that barked at you every day, as if to say, “You don’t belong here either.” Believe him. There is no real difference between you and him. You’re both caged, restless, misunderstood. Only he cannot speak his grief in your language.

Emigrate.

Don’t make peace with a place that treats you like a burden.

Every tree can turn green again, even when it’s uprooted — if you plant it in clean soil, far from poisoned roots, far from traitors’ piss and empty slogans.

Emigrate.

That’s my advice to you. Not because I think you’ll have an easy life — but because you’ll have a chance. A real one.