{"id":1168,"date":"2012-05-14T00:35:38","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T00:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue12\/?page_id=1168"},"modified":"2012-05-14T00:35:38","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T00:35:38","slug":"johanna-van-zanten","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/writings\/creative-non-fiction\/johanna-van-zanten","title":{"rendered":"Johanna Van Zanten"},"content":{"rendered":"

Without a Home<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Johanna Van Zanten<\/h6>\n

The perplexing thing is, that I never knew home until I left it. I lost my sense of home when I emigrated. Before that, I knew where I belonged, who my people were and what my language was. Without realizing it, I possessed a cultural identity and automatically assumed ownership of all the places in my home country, so well known from study books in school. I recognized without a second thought the places in photos and movies shown in the news media and those described in the stories told by others.<\/p>\n

I was very familiar with my nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history, with the last World War\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s effects on our population, especially on our dramatically and devastatingly decreased Jewish citizenry. I knew when the 100-year war with Spain ended and how the Prince of Orange arrived at his job as the first Father of the Nation. Dialogue I overheard contained no underlying secrets to discover. Nobody tried to figure out what exactly I was saying and no misunderstandings occurred because of my use of a word that does not quite fit. No one laughed at my mispronunciations or questioned my ability to work on writing assignments within a group. I always had excellent grades for any language project in school, regardless whether in French, English, German, or Dutch; I was destined for greatness, or at the very least, a good job. I took all that for granted, until my 33rd year.<\/p>\n

On April Fools\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Day, two days after my birthday, I left for Canada, in possession of a fair level of fluency of the language, or so I thought. After all, the music of my generation was in English created by British and American artists, and sometimes by Canadian musicians, although the distinction between the latter two was not very clear to me at the time. I had given myself a year to find out whether I could become comfortable enough to stay and live with my chosen new man. What could be the big deal, right? A year should be good enough.<\/p>\n

I now recognize the enormity of that step and its effects on the rest of my being, on my personality, and the stress it exerted on my brain processes, not in the least on my sense of identity. No level of preparation could have armed me against the effects of the loss of the underpinnings of that identity, which was based on a shared national history, on the methods used in the education system, on the beliefs about, and attitudes towards, others\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 religions, and on the level of critical thinking that the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leaders encouraged. When I lost the privilege of automatically knowing what people around me were talking about, I felt as if I were floating in a no man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s land. It was almost like being born again at an adult age but needing to learn a whole new set of skills.<\/p>\n

Home, what is that anyway? I have struggled with that concept ever since I left the safety and comforts of my country of birth. Since then, I can only feel a nostalgic sense of what home was. When I fly over my home country preparing to land before feeling the bump of the wheels hitting the tarmac, I feel a familiarity that is like a soothing blanket softly laid out over me by an unseen hand. Whenever I meet people born in my country of origin an immediate familiarity arises within a few sentences of our exchange \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as if they were a twin removed at birth for some reason, and whom I never met until this moment.<\/p>\n

Before I left home forever, I travelled a lot to other countries during a few weeks of the year. In hindsight I now see those trips as experiments. I took in the flavours and natural beauty of foreign sites, so different from home; all that was new to the eye and challenged the senses was exciting to me. On return home, I made comparisons and weighed the benefits of home; maybe a longing to return to that beautiful place lingered.<\/p>\n

But, the return to what is familiar is also soothing; to fall back into a routine takes no effort. My brain got to process the new impulses and I put my conclusions into the back of my mind. This country is like this and my evaluation is just that: a story to share with others. Although I enjoyed the experiences of travel very much, leaving my country forever is nothing like going away for a vacation. My brain cannot process that much information for that long; it cannot return to equilibrium and is challenged beyond anything that is comfortable. Stressed, I become insecure.<\/p>\n

I search for the familiar. My tongue is getting twisted with the foreign language and my brains seem to work extremely slow; I cannot grasp anymore what my companions are joking about, I miss the nuances, have no clue what those words in that context mean. I am looking for a reprieve. I go to bed early.<\/p>\n

My new friends are completely opposite from my old friends, their lives filled with rough teasing and much drinking – none of it makes sense to me. For months on end my ability to adapt is stretched and stretched, until it feels as if only a thin line connects me to sanity. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lucky circumstance that I find work with mentally challenged young people. They have patience, they see no differences, and they accept me unconditionally.<\/p>\n

Slowly I feel my acute stress levels decrease. I can feel my level of familiarity rise: my now very small world of the group home, with only a few people around me, makes my day to day life predictable, and the routine gives me a bit of security.<\/p>\n

My companion is quickly getting tired of me, the novelty of a new girlfriend wearing off. He wants to hang out with his buddies as before, drinking and playing pool in the bar. I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let him without a fight: I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t leave all my friends and my comfy life behind for that! I whine and demand, I get clingy, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t recognize myself. I cry myself to sleep. How long is this terrible time going to last? Who can I talk to? Does anybody even like me here? What am I doing here? Should I go home?<\/p>\n

I get a driver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s license \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my first. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fun driving the large boat around, a Ford Elite 2-door, especially with this little traffic on these rural roads. The purchase of a home \u00e2\u20ac\u201c another first \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is the next step in my adjustment; I literally get my foot in the door in this new environment. The house has a garden and I am digging in, the dirt gliding loose and soft though my fingers. The plants are growing well in this climate, carrots and lettuces smoothing their way into my taste and favour. This is familiar to me, makes me think of home, the weeding so soothing and automatic, leaving my mind to wander freely.<\/p>\n

I make new friends to my taste who can actually carry on conversations that make sense to me, some of them from elsewhere too. We laugh about our ideas and the differences we noticed around us. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safety in numbers. My brain produces some endorphins and I am actually enjoying myself. It has been a year since I left home. Life is beginning to make sense again.<\/p>\n

I have lived an almost equal number of years in my new country and in my country of birth. Nevertheless, I have accepted that my new home will never feel like home. Yes, I have adjusted, found a job, built a career and even had a taste of the education system by earning a degree. I have a daughter who was born here. To her, this is home. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYou can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go home again.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 I now know what that sentence means. Although I left my home out of free will, I have lost the sense of an exterior home, of a home country. I built a new life after divorce, made connections with friends and have a meaningful life. I would not have done a thing differently, even if I had known everything beforehand.<\/p>\n

What did I gain by leaving home? I have found my home inside myself, within my brain, after discovery of my ability to adapt. I feel I can live anywhere, in any country, undergo any number of changes and still survive. The human spirit is my home: it is indomitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without a Home Johanna Van Zanten The perplexing thing is, that I never knew home until I left it. I lost my sense of home when I emigrated. Before that, I knew where I belonged, who my people were and what my language was. Without realizing it, I possessed a cultural identity and automatically assumed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":339,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1168","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1171,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1168\/revisions\/1171"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}