My pros and cons of an international life

PROS

• Humbling experience

In Portugal, if you’re the best from your little town in God-knows-where, you’re already treated like Dr. So-and-So. Abroad, the pool is much more competitive, which rarely goes hand in hand with big egos. There will always be someone better, more driven, more charismatic, with more summer schools under their belt, better grades, more languages, better networking, or more luck in life. I liked it. I expected rampant pretentiousness; I found classmates doing their third master’s degree and feeling miserable because they couldn’t land a €1,500 a month internship. It serves as fuel to get to the level of the people you admire, but it’s not for everyone. I feel stupider than ever, but I know I handle that feeling more or less well.

• Nobody knowing who my boyfriend is

No place within the portuguese system of reference, only within my private one. Only within that confined moment, a particular time and place at the College, our friends and classmates know what “me” and “him” and “us” means, and in there it will remain crystallised. I know what it means, the languages he speaks, who his parents are, his privacy versus my exposure, but nobody else here does. The freedom of being loved before being perceived.

• The confirmation that I’m going to be someone in this life

Even if it borders on vanity, after entering a more demanding world, I became more convinced that I have something distinctive about me, something qualitative rather than quantitative. A restlessness, an “it-factor”. An unshakeable faith in myself, even though I feel that Time is always running behind me with a knife pointed at my back. And if it isn’t an innate quality, I will force it into existence until it becomes a credible one.

• The pure happiness of it all

I loved having a fourth-hand bicycle that made far too much noise rolling over the cobblestones of Bruges, cycling past the canals on my way to my converted-convent-residence. I loved suddenly becoming patriotic after just a few months abroad; catching a sight of a bolinho de bacalhau was enough to send me to my knees in gratitude. I loved being a party girl, I loved loving and being loved. I loved being intellectually challenged on a daily basis. I loved the fleeting look of surprise on my father’s face when the most unlikely scenario of all - me actually being there, having a scholarship, being happy, everything working out in the end - happening simply under my own command. I love being happy and I love being alive. “Can’t believe this is my life, smiling through it all!”

• I became more democratic

I encountered a different type of diversity. Of course, take it with a grain of salt, at a university where annual tuition is €30,000. Still, I arrived with a predisposition, a deep fear of my lack of cultural and international capital, and it was only in loco that I realised I had a stereotype of my future classmates. Classmates with three nationalities who spoke four languages because they were children of immigrants. The first time I had Jewish or Muslim colleagues. Feeling genuinely exhausted by the performative virtuosity of some left-wing people. Going to an event organised by the conservative right because I know I live in a champagne-left bubble, because I have few friends on the right, and because calling myself a democrat is not enough if I rarely sustain dialogue with people who are completely opposed to me. I hated it and felt uncomfortable the entire time, but going and pushing myself to the limit made me think more deeply than many conversations I have had within intellectual left-wing circles. I still know myself to be a left-wing feminist, but with a renewed willingness to interrogate those convictions, which has given me greater serenity in holding them.

CONS

• Having to ask my mother to take my Vinted parcels for me

Obviously, clothes that no longer fit me, or that I no longer care for, are not going into my two 23-kilo checked bags for six months, which means confining my profits to the increasingly scarce days I spend at my parents’ house. Worse still is forgetting to put things on Vinted during the first few days after I arrive, only to sell them once I’ve already left. “Hi Mum, could you do me a favour? Could you take my Vinted parcels to the shop…” followed by a series of detailed instructions about the obscure places where each item of clothing is hidden, the address of the shop, and an explanation of the concept of it being perfectly acceptable to package Vinted things in a completely bizarre way… My mother’s poor digital literacy and my material baggage locked in a battle of the titans.

• Not having my books with me

A powerful passage from Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life accompanies me in spirit. The age of geniuses is long gone; all that remains are the determined, the stoic in their struggle. And I can’t reproduce it verbatim because I don’t have the book with me, nor can I look it up because I don’t know the exact words used in the quotation, and it bothers me. My emotional attachment to certain literary passages is so great that I remember exactly how and where on the page I underlined them. Being separated from my underlinings feels like being torn away from my talismans. I really needed to have it with me at this point in my life, and perhaps that is why I now feel somewhat less fortunate in my inspiration.

• Leaving things behind

Leaving fifteen kilos of clothes and belongings in Bruges because I was too financially broken to buy another overpriced suitcase in a tourist town with ridiculous prices. Only being able to retrieve that package three months later, and spending a month in Lisbon using my housemate’s hairdryer because mine is in said package. Forgetting my ten-year-old Havaianas at my friend’s house in Amsterdam and having no foreseeable future in which I can wear them again, forcing me to walk around in a €5 pair of flip-flops I had to buy at Ale-Hop in Valencia, constantly reminded of how much I miss my beloved hard-soled Havaianas. Not knowing where my best eyeshadow palette is, the brown one from Too Faced that smells like ginger, whether I lent it to my friend from the College residence, whether it’s in the cardboard box in Bruges, whether it’s at my parents’ house in Braga. And everyone knows brown eyeshadows are the ones that suit me best…

• Class, always class

Always this obsession with class, with the social and cultural capital I lacked, the only plausible explanation whenever I felt like a misfit, even when I don’t particularly deviate from the elite mould. Privately educated but the daughter of public-school teachers; a city girl, but from a city known only to Spanish people or football enthusiasts. Subtle variations which, in moments of insecurity, I used in my head as some kind of refuge, a refuge that disappears when a Portuguese friend at the College tells me, “You make fun of posh people, but you end up fitting the pattern just as much…”, and she is right. My insecurities were never really about what I was, but rather about what I aspired to be. The middle class is a no man’s land, an unforgiving place to occupy when you are too ambitious for your own mediocrity. You always end up looking ridiculous if you are sufficiently oblivious to try to manufacture a story of overcoming adversity. When people joked about me speaking too loudly, when I didn’t know what Le Figaro meant within the French political landscape, I attributed it to class, when in reality I was (am) simply still in the process of becoming the stereotype of myself.

• Anglicisms

My speech (and worse, my thoughts) are populated, stuffed, overflowing with Anglicisms. People criticise me for it (rightly so) in public discourse, when they catch me off guard and English expressions spill out of me to an alarming degree. I now have to make an effort to erase the traces of English expressions from my writing, and I completely lose control of in text messages. How do I justify this particular flaw without sounding pretentious? “Sorry, I studied abroad.” The girl who cannot stop her very “properly posh”1 education from imposing itself on a conversation.

THINGS I STILL DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO COUNT AS PROS OR CONS

• Being the stereotype of myself

Being “properly posh.” Studying abroad, coming back with laurels, celebrated for what I did abroad when several classmates were much better than me. Shit in Brussels, diamond in Lisbon. Letting myself become increasingly entangled in the romance of the European project because being part of the post-national class suits me so well. Being the youngest of the youngest people in the room, knowing this person and that person, making a Reel delivering my opinion like a verdict. Speaking four languages, having a friend in every European capital, knowing that people ask “How did she do that”.

(…)

• “You dream in a language that I can’t understand”

When my boyfriend and I were still just friends, we travelled together on the bus during our master’s study trip. It was October. We already had a certain intimacy, we played noughts and crosses in his little notebook but the conversation wandered and eventually landed on our psyches. He told me that he dreamed in all of his native languages (four of them, imagine that). I felt estranged from him in that moment; until then, I had only ever dreamed in Portuguese (how bizarre that that isn’t everyone’s experience).

I couldn’t help feeling, in that moment, another class barrier separating us, buried as deeply as our unconscious. I could not access his inner world, nor he mine, but he accepted his quadrilingual dreams as something I would eventually come to understand, while I experienced my monolingual dreams as an anchor.

The next day, I let a friend stay over at my place, now in August. A known sleep-talker, those who have shared a bed with me have often woken in the middle of the night to hear me having some completely nonsensical conversation. That day, my friend told me, “You spoke so much English in your sleep! I didn’t know you had such a good accent.”

Lukas, perhaps you can access my inner world now. I just can’t stop thinking about what that means about me.

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We see each other soon!

Isabel Lobo