Lilac Colored Glasses

I had a brief, flickering moment of optimism when I was asked to work for a week in the daycare in Wondelgem earlier this month.

Within two days I knew it wasn’t a place I’d want to stay working long term, but I still clung to the faint glimmer of hope that I’d have work in childcare, an opportunity to jam my immigrant foot in the door of the Belgian employment system.

We all know how that ended though.

So now I’m enrolled in something called “trajectbegeleiding” through the VDAB. Hopefully my caseworker will help me get a job in childcare, or if not, she’ll help me figure out what else I should train for in order to find a job here. I’ve only had one meeting so far and that ended with me getting a phone number to call on August 4th to try to arrange an interview with a daycare owner in GentBrugge. Apparently the woman running the place emphasized that she wanted someone with excellent Dutch.

So I’m pretty much fucking doomed from the start, although I do plan on calling and trying to get the interview anyway.

And I really don’t know how to feel anymore. I can’t characterize how I feel as hopeless because it’s gone beyond hopeless into some weird sense of “gritting my teeth for the duration of whatever” and I don’t even know what the “whatever” is supposed to be in that statement. CB wants me to start reading in Dutch to help improve it.

I hate trying to read in Dutch.

I love reading, so very very much. I’ve been reading since before preschool and very few things make me happier than being fully absorbed in a good book. In fact, the best part about quitting smoking two years ago wasn’t the lack of morning wheezing or the ability to still smell the shampoo smell in my hair at the end of the day; it was that I could buy more books, immerse myself frequently in texts that took me to amazing places and put me inside the heads of populations of other people living completely different lives.

It takes me two hours to slog through a 4 page magazine article in Dutch with my dictionary. I have to make notes in the margins to refer to and it sucks all the enjoyment out of the act of reading. Reading transforms from a soothing, warm scented bath into a twisted, choking maze of thorny vines.

And in the meantime, I’m also not reading any books in English because typically if I do, it prompts the suggestion to read Dutch from CB. And then I feel guilty, so to compensate, I just don’t read in either. Yesterday I received a package from my mother with a novel called The Missing Ink inside. CB handed me the package around noon yesterday and I finished the book this morning around 9:00. And honestly, the book wasn’t my style, nor was it any sort of spectacular writing, but it was a fictional novel in English and I tore through it faster than a shark through a seal pup.

Which brings me back to how I’m feeling about myself and my future in Belgium right now: completely empty and relatively ambivalent.

My future is here as long as my CB is here, I’ve been able to wrap my head around that. But me, myself? My personal feelings of excitement, ambition and drive? They crept off with their tails between their legs somewhere between my decision to stop studying at UGent and my failed trial period in Wondelgem.

I’m tired of trying and failing. Tired of striving for goals that I can’t even picture solidly in my head anymore. Tired of assuring myself of my future here when I feel so ghostly within the present. Every day I wake up and curse the clock and my conscious for rousing me so early into a world where I feel so aimless. I can’t wait for it to be late enough to acceptably go to bed so the day of nothingness can end. And yes, I know that sounds like depression but I’m not feeling depressed, just lost in a world where it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever really belong.

It took me almost 26 years of life to finally settle in on a path to the future. Not my original path and maybe not the one of my dreams, but one that I felt happy, comfortable and capable on. And it took less than two years to be, once again, stuck in a muddy rut not too many steps from square one.

Only this square one is far away from my family and most of my friends and it’s in a culture and language that isn’t mine. And I wonder sometimes if it ever will be.