Diary of SpanishI was Born in Latin America, My Friends are in Europe and I'm Living In India… My Daily Life… My Friends… My Diary

I was listening to a podcast by Isolated Internationals which I found through twitter. They are a group of professionals dedicated to help global citizens with all the different kind of obstacles that they might find when moving to another country and culture.

During the podcast they mentioned something that got stuck in my head: “The Illusion of complete integration” in a different culture or society.

There were certain points mentioned:

“Complete integration in another culture is very difficult if not impossible to achieve“.

“The end destination is coping with how we are going to live in this different place”.

“We’ll always be different from the people there, no matter what”.

All this let me thinking a lot. I am a relatively new expat in India, and I was certainly having the illusion that one day, eventually, I was going to fit here. This really popped my bubble, but I guess they are right. Some small part of me used to have a similar thought “hey, maybe you will not fit here after all” but I thought that maybe I was being too pessimistic.

But as they also said, it’s not about being pessimistic, it’s about being realistic. And the truth is that is takes a lot of time and energy to adjust to a new culture. I end up exhausted most of the time and indeed you need to work a lot on it, specially when the differences are so big.

How long would it take to fill that gap between one culture and another? Or rather, is it possible to fill it at all?