The Immigrant Route #4: The never ending journey of self-discovery
A deeply personal essay and how writing became my safe haven.
“The Immigrant Route” is a weekly column published on Mondays featuring personal essays on self-care and love, mental health, family, careers, and personal stories from the voice of an immigrant. To gain full access to the story, consider becoming a paid subscriber here.
In 2017, I wrote a letter to myself in the future. It was addressed to a version of myself in ten years or so. I wrote this letter a month before I left my hometown and ventured to the States, where I moved to a lake-filled suburban town in Central Florida. I wrote this letter because it was amongst my ways of processing the agonizing anticipation of leaving my whole childhood behind and going to live in a completely different country; it was a way for me to feel excited for what’s to come, to make the best of what the prospects are out there. I remember when I was writing it, I kept wondering about how I’d feel transitioning into American life. Daydreamed about where I’d be, if I was doing what I was passionate in or achieving what I had dreamt about. Whether or not I found love. It hasn’t been ten years yet, but I look back at the letter as a reminder of how far I’ve come. And here I am - I’ve managed to survive twenty-four orbits around the sun. It is crazy to me that I wrote this letter almost seven years ago, and have already achieved so much that I had hoped for when I initially wrote it. I’m pretty proud of myself. But since, there’s so much I’ve learned about my twenties and about life: my career, my family, and my own mental health wellbeing. Reading that letter again makes me want to cry at how innocent I was with my loud dreaming and massive ambitions. Now that I’m older, and with a changed worldview, it’s time to start a new season of a series that I call life.
Dear Future Nikki is the title of a blog post I published on my (now inactive) blog I’ve had since 2015. The blog holds near and dear to my heart as my safe haven, my space for self-expression, and where I really harnessed my writing style and skills. My blog reflected the evolution of my personality and identity, going through different names and phases: from “theabstrusemind.blogspot.co.uk” and “florrall.blogspot.co.uk”, to “nicole-isabel.com” and now “nicoleisabel-archives.blogspot.com”. I wrote a wide range of content, including essays and articles on fashion and lifestyle, shared my art projects and photographic work when I was studying photography and design for my A-levels, and some poetry around the time I started getting into sonnets and sestinas. It was through this passion side-project when I discovered writing is my calling and, since, it has helped me through some of my toughest challenges.
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