Recently I was asked if I ever wanted to go back home to Armenia. Or rather, the question was put before me this way: “You don’t want to go back to your country, do you?” The question itself struck me as ridiculous, if not insulting, and despite the fact that lately I have been wondering whether I actually will be going back home anytime soon and knowing that I’m in a much healthier place now, that I’m away from everything that used to frustrate and aggravate me about my own country, my immediate respond to the question was “Why? Of course I want to go back. I love it there…” In respond to which I got a look of disbelief and something resembling pity – the way you look at slightly disturbed people, like they don’t know any better…

It makes me slightly uncomfortable to think that I might be looked upon as a refugee, who was lucky enough to escape a post-communist, underdeveloped third world country and has found shelter in this land of freedom, wealth and prosperity. As much as I know that this is not the case, I am aware that very often that’s exactly how I am perceived. As much as I try to persuade them (as well as myself) otherwise, I am not sure if I will be able to list at least one rational and legitimate reason for my being here, other than this "wealth, freedom and prosperity". I’m here after all, aren’t i? This time neither as a student, nor an “alien relative”, my permanent residency status obtained in series of rather unfortunate than lucky events. In a way I feel like I’m being hypocritical. I could have chosen not to come back at all, or if I had to, follow all the steps to obtain a student vise before I was granted a residency status. Yet I made the choice, and even if I know that it wasn’t the promise of a “better life” that brought me here, I don’t think I will be able to explain to myself, let alone anybody else, why I chose to come back. Does personal paranoia of being trapped and landlocked in one place for too long stand as a valid reason? Do past unresolved issues and memories appear legitimate? Does it appear plausible that one day I would probably be just as happy to leave the States, once again, for some other, completely unfamiliar and unexplored place? This pretty much ends all my arguments… So where do I go now?

The truth is, I’m split between the two countries. And it goes beyond liking them both, for one reason or another. Or disliking them, for that matter. They say when you spend considerable amount of time away from your own country, you will no longer be able to go back and feel at home in your own home. You change somewhere between exploring a new, different culture and reconsidering your own. It's inevitable, especially when the process starts when you're relatively young and flexible (I was fifteen, when I first got here). At the same time, as easy as it was for me to adapt to this new country (and I do not think that it’s possible to get more assimilated than I am right now, unless I was born here), I will never be able to feel fully at home here either, knowing that as open as I am, I will always be foreign, to one degree or another.

Being split between two completely different cultures, this partial assimilation to the new, acquired culture and dissimilation from your own gives you a unique, dual vision of both worlds, and a somewhat split and at times surreal sense of reality. It is both fascinating and overwhelming at the same time. It takes away the ability to take any social, cultural or political phenomenon for granted, or as some kind of an absolute. It makes you constantly question, compare reconsider, and makes you a bigger skeptic than you'd actually want to be. They say that’s how you grow beyond cultural borders and broaden your outlook, but perhaps that’s just being spread thin and scattered, with a feeling of being constantly uprooted…

It’s true that a part of me is glad to be away from Yerevan. As much as I love it, I know that it’s better that I’m away right now. It’s not starvation, oppression and economic hardship that I’m trying to escape, but whatever the reason is, I should consider myself fortunate, if for nothing else, at least for having a choice to be here on my own volition. Something that many others don’t and will not have. But at the same time, I have this nagging feeling that by being away from home, I am missing something important and valuable and losing the grip of the reality there. As if soon enough I won’t be able to claim it as my own ( and more on this later…)
It actually disturbs me more than being considered a first generation refugee-immigrant who was lucky enough to escape whatever it was she was trying to escape.