The Girl I Met In Belgium
I always thought foreignness was something outside of me. New cities. New people. New languages. Distance measured in kilometers.
But when I arrived in Belgium, I realized foreignness can live much closer than that. Sometimes it sits right beneath your own skin – quiet, patient, waiting for you to finally notice it.
My first night in Hasselt felt strangely hollow. The room was white and silent, too tidy to feel like mine. I lay there with the ceiling staring back at me, thinking of home as if I could hold onto the life I had left behind just by losing myself in endless loops of painful memories.
I wasn’t homesick. Not really. I was self-sick. Alienated from the person I had been and terrified of the person I might become.
Foreignness isn’t loud. It doesn’t arrive as a sudden shock. It slips in quietly – in forgotten routines,
in the way your name sounds when no one around you knows it, in the moments where you realize
you’re not sure who you’re supposed to be here.
I tried to outrun it. I tried to fill the silence. I tried to be the “me” from home, the one who laughed easily, the one who had answers, the one who knew her place.
But Belgium is honest. Brutally, beautifully honest. It takes away everything familiar until all that’s left is yourself – unfiltered, unarranged, unavoidable.
I expected comfort to wash over me like warm water. But everything felt… smaller.
As if I had stepped into a memory instead of a place. Home hadn’t changed. But I did, just a little, and something quiet inside me had started to rearrange itself.
When I returned to Belgium, I stopped fighting. I let the strangeness sit beside me instead of pushing it away.
I listened to my thoughts instead of silencing them.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the unfamiliar began to soften.
Just when I thought I had found stability, exam season arrived like a storm. Relentless. Unforgiving. A reminder that growth is rarely linear and almost never comfortable.
The pressure was sharp. Sharper than anything I had known.
I failed. I tried again. I doubted myself, again and again, like waves hitting the same stone until it begins to change shape.
But this time, losing my balance didn’t feel like collapsing. It felt like transforming. Like shedding a skin that had grown too tight.
Foreignness didn’t disappear – it simply evolved.
From fear to awareness. From resistance to acceptance. From losing myself to meeting myself.
Looking back, I realize I didn’t travel abroad to study. Not really.
Belgium wasn’t a destination. It was a mirror. A quiet one. One that didn’t distort or flatter, but showed me the parts of myself I had blurred for years.
I didn’t lose myself there. I lost the version of me that no longer belonged to the person I was becoming.
And maybe that’s the point. To become a stranger to yourself just long enough to finally recognize who you are.
Foreignness didn’t take me away from myself. It brought me home.
And I didn’t choose Belgium out of longing or excitement.
To be honest, I didn’t choose it at all. I didn’t have a dream destination, no list of places I wanted to see, no burning desire to „go abroad and find myself“.
People asked me why I was leaving. I said, „Because I have to“ or „I don’t know.“ Both were true.
Belgium wasn’t fate. It wasn’t a plan. It was a suggestion – a name someone mentioned in passing, probably hoping I’d join a new project.
And out of stubbornness, out of indifference, or simply because I didn’t care enough to resist, I said yes.
Not because I wanted to go. Not because I felt drawn to Hasselt. But because saying „no“ would have required admitting how terrified I was of leaving everything familiar behind.
I didn’t choose Belgium.
But maybe,
Belgium chose me.
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