On leaving Europe, or what I imagine divorce must feel like

A stream of consciousness unedited piece - also known as adventures in personal essays

Have you ever counted the amount of frozen shrimp options for sale at an American grocery store? The first time I found myself doing this, I counted at least 6 different ones ranging from spicy to coconut to spicy coconut (and more!).

I had forgotten what American excess is, what choice paralysis could be, what an absolutely mind-boggling experience it is to walk between rows and rows and rows of frozen food items and see absolutely nothing of interest but everything of awe (why are there peanut butter and jelly flavored bao buns in America? Who wanted this? Why? How?)

It’s been what, three or four months since I returned to the U.S.? I’m beginning to suspect the acute phase of my return is coming up - acute phase being the fancy way of saying the most intense phase. Though I’ve never been divorced and have no plans to do so, leaving a life behind in one country to move across continents (again) sure feels like one. That being said, since I’m an American who left Europe, I do have to say that whatever first French or Dutch or whatever husband I would have inevitably ended up divorcing has found a wonderful stand-in with the metaphor of divorce being a move from the continent back to the U.S. It’s just as messy and costly in addition to being tormenting in the abstract, but at least there’s no kids and KLM also definitely put me in a difficult situation over my baggage (that’s right - my baggage issues, they’re literal, not even metaphorical at this point).

The baggage is real in every sense - linguistic, professional, existential. Let me show you what I mean.

I remember a job interview I had done not too long after returning. The official working language is English, but the interviewer, seeing that I speak French, decided to do the interview in French for the entirety of it. Quel dommage since I’ve spent the past four years speaking Dutch. Reader, I didn’t get the role and I have a feeling as frustrating and rude as it was, this is par the course for Europeans who like to live between worlds and use language as a subtle test of belonging.

Similarly, another role at a European office didn’t even bother to interview me though I’ve heard firsthand they’ve been complaining about not finding qualified local staff (interesting, right?). I don’t believe I’m entitled to anything, don’t get me wrong - when a candidate has the rather niche skillset and languages you’re looking for, I do have to question how many Belgians I may have been competing with, I guess?

Yet here’s the thing about these little games some Europeans play - they’re invariably played by the middle managers of corporate and diplomatic life. The same week I was getting linguistically hazed by a nepobaby mid-level bureaucrat, I had coffee with a senior official who couldn’t have cared less that I mangled a spelling or two in my email. The Europeans with actual power, the ones shaping decisions and policy rather than gatekeeping entry-level positions, tend to be more interested in what you think than how perfectly you conjugate your subjunctives. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

At the same time, the American equivalent to these games is almost more insulting - instead of testing whether you belong, they simply can’t compute that you exist and if they do, they project onto you if they’re intimidated and insecure with themselves. Where Europeans gatekeep, Americans malfunction. They look at your background and either dismiss it as ‘overqualified’ (code for: we don’t know what box to put you in) or they mythologize it into something completely unrecognizable.

I had an American recruiter say to me - very seriously, with no irony, he was completely sincere and believed in his words - ‘one day you’ll be giving a speech at the UN and I’ll look like the asshole I am’. I should note that I never wanted to work at the UN. I never said that. The recruiter projected it onto me. But it’s nice to think that he found that fair, I guess?

I’ve returned to a world of ragebaiting grifters across media soaking in the excesses of drudgery ringing dollar bills into their accounts, of people walking around like zombies whether it be worshipping a screen or as a result of fentanyl, a world I find dizzying and familiar and foreign to me as an American in between worlds. I also find myself in a job market that does not know how to place me properly even though it seemingly extols my backgrounds (quantify a person - 2 master’s degrees, 4 languages, cross-functional cross-sector cross-everything, she knows the language of law, of finance, of politics, and has worked in all sorts of situations operational and on the ground first hand with clients - but alas, I do not know what to do with her or her skills so it’s easier to just...pass, though I’m sure Ani will do well in X Y Z field).

But this isn’t my first rodeo with continental displacement and its attendant tragedies.

The first time I moved to Europe, I was run over by a motorcyclist on the boulevard St. Germain and couldn’t walk for close to a year. It’s also how I became fluent in French and very adept at emergency situations, but that’s another story for another time. Suffice to say, I have a nasty habit of ending up in hospital rooms abroad.

Now, the second time I moved to Europe, it was for graduate school and after two back to back master’s degrees, I am thrilled to announce that I have what amounts to half a PhD and apparently not much else for it except having learned that the worst thing you can do is to do anything out of fear. I am still learning this lesson every single day in different ways. It is immensely frustrating, annoying, and seemingly without end.

Without going into detail, in retrospect I realize both moves were both preceded and bookended by a spate of tragedies that have come to define certain key moments of my life. This is something that compounds with the sheer stress of uprooting everything, but while it is happening, in that very moment, it all blurs together and can’t be separated. Life is not part and parcel when you make big swings and change directions both literally and metaphorically - it’s everything everywhere all at once. In retrospect, I can see clearly now (cue the music) how those difficulties shaped the decisions and actions I took, but you can’t change the past and frankly, how could you even know what it would amount to?

At a Halloween party a few weeks ago, I found myself gravitating towards a corner of the yard where I overheard some accents and long story short, it turns out the party host’s brother’s second wife (now ex wife) is English and has lived in the states for quite a few years. It was mutually understood between us and one other bloke (sorry, I had to use the term, indulge me, it was jolly good alright?) - what it means to be a stranger in a strange land where everything is possible without limits.

Which brings me to the taxonomy of displacement, because if there’s one thing academics taught me, it’s how to categorize my own alienation.

You have your Americans in Europe, your Europeans in America, the Americans who want to be European, the Europeans who want to be American, the Americans who returned to America and insist upon letting you know that they lived in Europe, the Europeans who returned to Europe and reveal the experience letting you know that they lived in America, this whole mess, all of it. There are some Americans who make this their identity but they have sheltered themselves from any fallout of life abroad. I find that those who moved for academic or career related reasons tend to be the most insulated from assimilation whereas those who moved for personal relationships face a double whammy of lacking a community while reinforcing an identity.

After the Halloween party, I seriously considered calling up a Dutch ex and asking him what I had done with my life, what have I done deciding to return, my god, but all I could find as I frantically went through my phone was an old photo of him with a kitten he had gotten from his father a long time ago. Distressingly and distressingly cute too, I had cropped him out of the picture because the kitten had proved to be a more reliable partner in a tough spot, go figure. So no call was made, except for maybe the Heideggerian one, the call to conscience.

It’s not that it’s necessarily hard to look at the pictures, it’s just that when I begin to, I’m overwhelmed. There’s thousands of them, thousands of photos ranging from the utterly mundane (screenshots, calendar reminders, events never RSVPed nor attended though intended) to the utterly marvelous (friends, loves, moments, landscapes where I felt nothing but love for the universe and my adventures). Then again, to be fair, I felt overwhelmed years ago even in the process of accumulating all those photos.

This is what it feels like to return - in retrospect maybe that’s what it feels like for intentions too - intentions for a life that felt never fully attended though I was there and I had meant to.

Growing up, I wanted to be Lara Croft and Carmen Sandiego but without the whole dying in a jungle bit that often resulted in my adventures with Lara.

Well, I got the adventure part down. The not dying in a jungle bit remains a work in progress, though these days the jungle looks suspiciously like walking around San Fran at the moment, let me put it that way.