Name: Amitai Gindell
Age: 31
Place of residence: Nuremberg, Germany
Most miss: spontaneity
In November 2015, I relocated my life to Germany. The copy worker is a bit funny because de facto there is no copy between my life before and after the transition.
The experience of being in a foreign place that is now your home is not easily digested. For good reason, the corny phrases I have heard are that time should be allowed to take its course and it is better not to formulate any decision in the initial stage. Rationally I agree with this completely, but at the same time, I still had to live my life every single day and deal with language, people, culture and emotional charges.
Foreigners, Alienation and Israelis
The sense of alienation has two sides. On the one hand it is exciting, intriguing and forces me to let go of the autopilot and see things in a different way. But on the other hand, it undermines all my safe and familiar foundations. Large parts of my past, my experience and my education have been found to be irrelevant to me. But at the same time, any contact with the outside world still followed the same world of concepts as I know it. So every wall I saw reminded me of the Jerusalem wall, a road trip accompanied by the thought that “I wish Israel would do this”, the low prices in the supermarket annoy me how much of a sucker I was in Israel, the local cultural solidarity is very pleasant but of course “they are cold and not as hot as we Israelis”.
Thus, like a ping-pong ball, absorbs something new but automatically compares it to familiar experiences from “old times.” An automated defense mechanism that keeps me feeling the sense of identity and slightly dims alienation and alienation.
Over time, I discovered that the conduct in my current life according to the paradigms that suited my life before the transition did not benefit him. Most often, they led to frustration and narrow observation of people. Every phenomenon I would include, every difficulty I would make excuses and every new experience that I had no explanation for, aroused in me a regression – like a little boy who does not understand what is going on around him, what is right and what is not true, what belongs to me and what I reject from me. Who am I? What am I?
“The practical stage has arrived”
The moment when I stopped dealing with comparisons and themes in the romo of the world is the day I started working. Suddenly I’m not just a bystander, but an integral part of this frame. I am in daily integration with people, I have to prove myself professionally and with all due respect to social theories, the practical stage has arrived.
My perceptions of myself need to be expressed and I have no lifeline – without my grumpy friends, family or familiar surroundings that I can take comfort in her arms. Without the language – which I have always had of help, and without social norms in which I conducted myself so naturally. Every little daily habit has raised doubts in me – is it allowed to speak on the phone? Why is everyone so quiet? Why don’t they turn on the light? How long is the lunch break? What’s allowed to ask? What’s forbidden? What to wear? Why don’t you laugh at the joke? Do they even realize it was a joke? And so on.
“I felt destitute”
My days, not to mention my first few months on the job, were a big challenge for me. Every day, I would come equipped with my beliefs about myself – a sociable, adaptive, sensitive but also rational person, knows how to achieve what he wants and optimistically sees life experiences.
Every day, and all my beliefs about myself were shattered one by one. Whole days when I would come to work and except on a good morning at the beginning of the day and bye at the end (not always), I didn’t make up a steering wheel. They all seemed smarter, prettier, more successful to me, and I felt destitute – stupid, ugly, hard to understand, waiting for someone to notice my plight and save me from this nightmare. When I still gained the courage to speak and ask something, I would first put the sentences in my head, but at the moment of truth the words would be confused for me. I’d look a colleague in the eye, not listen to the answer, just see my reflection with the vitreous of his eyes, and be ashamed of myself.
While the environment accepted this relatively equally and on the face of it I progressed, developed and “delivered”, my subjective experience was an experience of dissolution. Everything I thought I was, shattered in my face and every day I relived it. Foundations that I have built over the years and managed according to them have proved to me to be a running barrel armrest. I was left without any protection – completely exposed, naked. I felt that I was not living up to my expectations of myself, that the gap was so great and that I had no way of aligning the dissonance that was created. I felt like a stranger to myself.
I no longer understood what things I say and do belong to me and which one belongs to a desperate attempt to try to be something/someone else. Without the basic security, every little has become significant. Writing an email in English would have taken me hours, because I wasn’t sure whether to start hi, hey, hello, dear. The Germans seemed so professional, punctual, understandable and how much I tried to be like them, and although along the way I adopted and learned a lot of things from them, I always felt a less successful version B.
The moment of discovery of culture, of environment and of oneself
Precisely from this place, from the daily self-practice, from breaking all the tools, this is where I began to rebuild. I learned the hard way, first of all to know a different culture, that even if I do not connect to all the parts of it is still the environment in which I live and I need to know how to respect and manage within it and according to its standards.
But the more important experience is that I’ve come to know new things about myself. I went through a process, no shortcuts, no discounts. I poured new content about who I was, and I discovered abilities I didn’t know before. At the same time, I regained faith in the old tools I had acquired in my 31 years of life. Qualities that I have nothing to be ashamed of or hide, and more than that are actually my strengths.
I shifted the energy balance from trying to be someone else to becoming an upgraded version of myself. With confidence came also forgiveness, I am not in competition or in the test, it is ok to also make mistakes along the way and I am not perfect, there is always more to learn.
The process does not stop, at the macro level and in the general picture, I took a small step forward and the road is still long, but with a retrospective look, I would not skip any part of this experience and thanks to it today I can set a higher bar and also release when necessary.
I wish everyone an experience of change, shaking and rebuilding. Not to stay in the comfort zone but to go out, to challenge yourself and your perceptions, both about the environment and more importantly about yourself. You’d be surprised how much more we can learn, how much more trivial an experience it can be when we allow ourselves to experience it elsewhere. Not necessarily a physical place, but another mental place that allows us to do things not about an automaton but by looking inward and tinkering with the whole spectrum of our emotions and art.
READ MORE: Relocation to Europe
