First-Generation: A Journey of Discovery

I am a first-generation immigrant. I arrived in Montreal in 2010, and settled here with my brother and our parents. I was only 10 at the time, and North America was a place I sometimes saw on TV. It was the place where pirated VHS cassettes of Disney cartoons presumably came from (though it took me a long while to ever set foot in California). We landed on a mild Autumn day, and settled in a small downtown apartment for a few weeks before finding a more permanent place outside of the city. I had never experienced winter like that in my life, but what I remember the most is collecting 1 cent coins to save up for my first Canadian dollar. I also remember walking around the city exploring parks I had never imagined, with monkey bars and diggers in the sand. It was a weird time for me, because all of my references were suddenly gone, replaced by a promise of something better.

To most immigrant families, education is a golden ticket. It generally doesn’t require luck or talent — though some luck and talent are definitely welcome — just hard work, consistence and some money. Sure, not everyone can make it through, and certainly not everyone enjoys the process. It’s one thing to be good at schoolwork, and it’s another to enjoy, even be thrilled by the prospect of learning about science or geology or literature. To my family, education was not only a matter of financial success, but also one of our main values. My father told us how he believed that no matter the job, everyone should hold a university degree. So it was ingrained in both my brother and I that our idea of success should include higher education.

My brother and I were both doing relatively well in school, considering that we were learning two new languages at the same time. I suspect that I enjoyed the classroom part of school a little more than my brother did. We both went through the expected rise in our grades in classes like French and History, of which we knew very little at first. Then, by the time we graduated high school—my brother three years after me — we did not have to try so hard to get good grades, and we were both accepted into a good college. Yes, we both went to the same college and then university, in similar programs. I was originally forging a path for both of us. This was before my brother made decisions that suited him much better, and started showing me the way in a lot of things. And that’s where I was left behind, in a sense.

You see, for years, I studied and got good grades and didn’t really break a sweat. But then, one day, I looked back and realized that I did not have good friends and having good grades stopped giving me the satisfaction it used to. I was growing up and the world around me was becoming more open to me. My problems were more complex all of a sudden, and even doing well in school required more determination and better time management. This was my first year of university, where I failed a class for the first time in my life. I went on to have three excruciating years struggling with self-worth and a romantic relationship I didn’t really understand. During those three years, my ambitions were constantly at odds with my achievements in school. I withdrew into a cocoon of TV shows, meeting only the minimum requirements for every area of my life in order to maintain the status quo.

Needless to say, this unhappy state did not lead to the success I had hoped for. I wanted to become a doctor, and would even have settled for a well-paying job in research (an oxymoron if you’re familiar with the field of biological research). It was a devastating time, as I realized that I had no clue what I wanted to do if plan A failed, and plan A was failing. I had grown distant from my family, and relied mostly on my complicated romantic relationship and my roommate for support. At a time when even I didn’t know what I needed to feel stable (I still don’t always know), I could not blame anyone for not knowing how to help me. In a desperate attempt at maintaining some stability, I applied for another bachelor’s degree, this time in Computer Science.

This was a welcome change for me. Although my girlfriend of five years broke up with me, and despite crying in my bed for a long time (hours at a time, and over a period of weeks), I started to make some sense of my own life. My relationship with my family became a priority again, and I started getting better grades. As Computer Science became a more realistic career path for me, I started to leave behind the idea of becoming a doctor. Little by little, it seemed as though I was reaching some sort of stability. I still felt isolated, not having processed any of my own trauma from changing countries, a turbulent family life and the end of a relationship that had become the better part of my identity. So it was no surprise that after graduation, finding a 9 to 5 job did not exactly make me feel whole. It brought up questions such as: “If this doesn’t make me happy, then what will?” How naïve of me to think that money solves any problem but the lack thereof.

Then, I was fired. I was unhappy at my job, and everyone could tell. Therefore, my manager kicked me out! Though, in reality, the drama of it was limited to a dull conversation about my lack of motivation and some well-wishing. I was actually the first person that my manager had fired, and I could tell. The room was quiet for minutes at a time, and I did not feel like I needed to make conversation for once. I packed my stuff and left, with a big, incredulous smile on my face, unaware that this could be a potentially stressful situation. I was just happy to no longer have to go to work!

When you grow up thinking that things will generally work out for you the way I have, you may stumble and forget how you ever knew how to walk in the first place. In my case, I had achieved the one and ultimate source of stability: money! Yet, my life was emotionally chaotic and lacked the kind of deep, meaningful connections that I was craving. I hadn’t developed any of the social skills that I desperately needed. Moreover, I was afraid of opening up and being vulnerable, even with people that knew me well already. I just didn’t know how to. So this quickly became a period of isolation, and I knew something had to change. There was a depth to life that I just wasn’t able to reach, so I had to change everything. That’s when I left on a trip for a few months. The story of this trip is for another time.

Upon returning to Montreal, I began trying out some of the things I had always been wondering about but never actually tried. I picked up sculpting as a new hobby, and started following classes in Hindi. Seeing people of color that formed the majority of the classroom was a wild experience for me. I was no longer used to it. Something about that classroom recalled a safety that I hadn’t felt since leaving my country. To be fully transparent, I have returned to my country since then, and that feeling of safety is not there either — not anymore. It’s now that I understand where this feeling comes from. No one can really understand the experience of immigration but other immigrants, of any generation. There is nothing quite like the experience of leaving behind everything that you hold dear (except for my wonderful family) even before you have had a chance to know exactly what they mean to you. Then, your must adapt to a new place and recreate a basic sense of stability before ever being able to wonder what it was that you left behind, and what it is that you now need. And what was it that I needed?

Well, I’ve had so much time to think about this and many other questions. In short, the answer is: community. Like the majority of people, I need a community. More accurately, in this day and age, we need many communities, where we can express different parts of us and offer these parts a home. Because, as I learned the hard way, you need more than money to make a home. People from many different walks of life come into your life to offer that piece of you a place to feel safe and to express itself. They offer you support and even criticism as needed, and if you behave well according to some basic values, like openness and respect, these interactions can become pillars for your budding new life.

For me, these people are my family, a few close friends, and the people I meet while doing activities that are particularly meaningful to me, like sculpting, or learning a new language. There are the rare occasions when I meet someone in a grocery store and we just hit it off. But generally, these relationships take time to shape — and it helps to have a common interest. They require energy and patience, and many of them don’t last for a very long time. But the idea is to create a community, a group. No one relationship will satisfy all of your needs, generally speaking, and to look at life with that expectation can make living feel very difficult.

So, I still have no idea what to do with my life. I’m pretty sure that even I will be surprised by what the next few years will hold in store. But there is something to be cherished in not knowing, especially when you have the people in your life that can accept you in your uncertainty. The people in my life have helped me become comfortable in my identity as an immigrant. I embody uncertainty, and a duality of cultural heritage that is quite hard to navigate at times. Having people to navigate with helps.