Venting I hate being an immigrant’s child

[idhayam]

During my "high school times", I was always an odd one out, despite there being others the same race as me. It was a barrier, one that stopped me from talking to others or practicing my social skills. It was a barrier that caused me a lot of problems, including what is currently my loneliness. Whenever I have to meet someone new or simply ask a stranger a question, it feels like my head is about to explode up until the moment it truly happens. I've lied so much to get myself out of situations that truly only benefitted myself, and the inability to simply tell who was always my closest friend that I was scared to come back to a cycling club that I enjoyed going to with my friend - because I was scared to meet new people - meant that I lost him forever. The only people I currently have to call a "friend" is really just someone that I hold onto to avoid the embarrassment of not having any friends at all.

I have always wondered what it would have been like to be born in my "true" land, a now-stabilised land marred with a history of war, where race isn't a concern before the things that matter the most, things like education or status. Because, I can rebel against these things - but isn't it unethical to rebel against the system of a country that I cannot even consider mine?

 

[EvisceratedJester]

Whichever country you are born in is your country. Your parents being immigrants doesn't change that. My mom is an immigrant, yet I have more in common with the average Canadian than I do with the average person from the Caribbean. It's to a point where even my mom has to call it out all the time.

Whichever country you were born and raised in is your country. That's the culture you grew up in. You probably have more in with others from that country than you do with those from your parents' country. Along with that, being the child of immigrants is honestly pretty cool in my opinion. While it comes with some struggles, you grow up getting to experience more than one culture. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed of.

 

[idhayam]

Whichever country you are born in is your country. Your parents being immigrants doesn't change that. My mom is an immigrant, yet I have more in common with the average Canadian than I do with the average person from the Caribbean. It's to a point where even my mom has to call it out all the time.

Whichever country you were born and raised in is your country. That's the culture you grew up in. You probably have more in with others from that country than you do with those from your parents' country. Along with that, being the child of immigrants is honestly pretty cool in my opinion. While it comes with some struggles, you grow up getting to experience more than one culture. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed of.

This is exactly the difference between myself and all the other immigrant children around me. Others accept what you have done without even thinking, but I have never been able to do that very thing. What I have instead done to myself is convince myself that the root of the hardships I face is due to this. I will always be jealous of this.. but what I did when I was younger is reject, as you state, the culture you grew up in.

I admired my mother, who is the "real" immigrant here, and I wanted to be like her, unlike my father, another immigrant (who lives as a whitewashed and is more engrossed to the culture of this country than I ever will be) who physically hit her with English words which my mother nor I would have understood at that time. I guess not knowing what British at that time meant, meant that for me at the time not being like my father equated to not embodying the "British culture" you speak of.

This whole post is an illusion that I have carefully built up in my own mind, an illusion that I am probably unwilling to change. I struggle to accept that the British culture is "the culture you grew up in", and I find the "you grow up getting to experience more than one culture" thing irrelevant because this is looked down upon in my country. I don't even know how I managed to do this but I naturally think in my mother tongue - Tamil - which is why I struggled so much in essay-based subjects, and couldn't even explain why to my mother because this is so dumb.

I realise when comparing your post to mine before I press send, that I am delusional. You have grown up the way that others have grown up around me, and you have grown up the way that I naturally should have, and this means that no one will ever relate to myself.