I'm rich

A cheque arrived in the mail today from the university - my study grant. For a short while I’m rich again.

Student life is an impoverished existence. Just keep writing. Remember the Stardust space shuttle. Its job was to collect samples from the universe to provide a window into the distant past, helping scientists around the world to unravel mysteries surrounding the birth and evolution of our Solar System.

My job is to collect snippets of human behaviour, compile them, organise them, write about them to provide a window into the past about people who have ventured far from home and made border crossings to create for themselves a ‘third place’ that lies somewhere between the familiar and the other. I unravel the differences about those who appear to be assimilated.

In my thesis I decided to reject my favourite academic quote:

“To leave one's homeland is to embark on one of the most difficult of journeys, a departure from the familiar: one's native culture, mother tongue, family and friends, neighbourhood. It involves a process of uprooting, a time of mental turmoil and physical insecurity. To emigrate is almost never a first option, rarely gladly embraced, the trauma of departure often hidden from self with the consolation that it is only temporary, that there will come a day of return.”

Markus and Clyne 2001

Why did I cut out this one? Too painful to face? Include it, highlight it and use it to make a point that the trauma was even greater for the involuntary immigrant – the accidental immigrants. The losses and the newly found riches are about self-making, changed identities. Write about it. I am the insider, one of the accidental immigrants. I am the one who can write.

Full steam ahead.