If you’re an expat (immigrant, or whatever name you like to give yourself), you probably often have people telling you you’re brave and that they could never do what it is you’re doing.
It feels a bit weird, no? To me, bravery looks completely different to anything I’ve ever done. It looks like Malala Yousafzai or a mountain rescuer or someone giving up a kidney to help someone else.
I feel like my daily life is really anything but courageous. I mean, today, I walked to work, bought a coffee and sat down at my desk to do the same kind of job I’ve done for the past 10 years or so. This evening, I will meet some old friends from Dubai (curiously, many of my Dubai friends have also moved to Amsterdam) and have dinner. It doesn’t feel so out of the ordinary. The bravest thing I’ve done this year is wear hotpants in public.
I’m sure you have these kinds of ‘you’re so brave’ comments, too… you post your pics of you outside the Grand Mosque or smoking shisha and it conjures up a sense of exoticism or adventure to those you know from back home. When you condense it down to ‘I moved to the Middle East when I was 23 to work on a fashion magazine’, it sounds pretty brave (I mean, not giving up a kidney brave, but…) but, when you take it a moment at a time, none of it took much in the way of guts. I got picked up from the airport, put in an apartment, told the bus I needed to take to work etc. It was bravery by numbers. If you look at it as one huge thing; finding an apartment, making new friends, figuring your way around a new city etc, then it’s overwhelming. But, if you deal with each task one by one, it makes the whole thing bite size and really manageable.
You can say the same about any big thing in life; having a baby – I’m definitely not brave enough for that. The thought of 18 years or more being responsible for someone else gives me heart palpitations. Giving birth? I can’t even comprehend how people psych themselves up for that. I feel the same about big weddings; all that organisation and money – no thank you very much. It sounds awful. Setting up a business scares me, too. It’s my ultimate dream, but also one that terrifies me to my very core.
I find the whole idea I’m brave quite funny. I’m the girl who’s so scared of cycling over tramlines I pull over and walk my bike along the pavement to avoid them. I get so worked up over going upside down in yoga that I’ve been known to cry in class about it. Moving to Bangkok with no job to go to? No problem. Doing a shoulder stand? No chance.
I guess anything worth doing is a little bit scary and the only way to get through it is to mentally deconstruct it and just do it a bit at a time.
