Mentalechoes

Not to complain or anything, but sometimes living in a foreign country can be very fucking trying, let me tell you. This whole dutch thing is crushing me a bit right now. I think it’s because I had a really good mate from home stay over for a long weekend with me, and we had a ball. However it also made me realise just how different this culture is from my own. I’ve been away from home so long now, I’m really starting to forget my roots, my identity, and who I am in a lot of ways. I’m never going to be dutch, at best I will probably be able to stop feeling like a square peg in a round hole, but this place is always going to be foreign and I will always be a foreigner in this country. I’ve started thinking maybe it’s time to go home. I remember feeling this way a year ago, so it’s not something new, but a cycle that has come full circle once again.

I often wonder though, is it me not working hard enough to fit in here. Fuck I don’t know. I really don’t ask questions like this anymore because I just don’t know the answer, and even if I did, I just don’t know how relevant it is. Sometimes I even start to wonder if I have lost the ability to meet new people and make friends. This place seems to be having this affect on me right now. Dutch culture is so clique oriented it’s almost a cliche. Our friday work borrels (work drinks) are a classic example, all the departments turn up and then stand around in groups together, not talking to anybody else from outside their work unit. It’s like when you were kids at a party and all the girls stood together then there was a gap, and then all the boys would be standing around together. For some reason, that same kind of attitude just pervades itself throughout this whole society. Perhaps I’m just some kind of social retard and there is something deeper happening in this society that I’m just not aware of, but to me, that just isn’t normal.

I think perhaps this feeling of being an outsider has been exacerbated by hearing about how other friends of mine are living the high life in London, in a way that I haven’t been able to acheive over here. Truth be told, there are times when it’s good fun to be a foreigner, because it makes everything interesting, even the mundane stuff, like travelling to work and back. But sometimes it can really get to you, this feeling of being a fringe dweller, where you are an outsider and left out in the dark.

I think maybe I need to take the rest of the week off and chill for a bit. My head seems to be a bit out of place right now.

Padwanna.