“A person not belonging to a particular place or group; a stranger or outsider.”
This is one of the definitions of a foreigner according to the Oxford Dictionary. When traveling to a different country where there is a new language and new culture will often make you feel exactly like this. You feel like a stranger or an outsider in a new place where you do not belong.
Being a foreigner in a different country can even give off the feeling of culture shock. Sometimes a sense of vulnerability and the feeling of being scared as well. You feel a bit out of place at first, yet as each day in the new country goes by you slowly begin to find your way little by little. You start feeling more comfortable in the new country, even though it may never feel like home.
I find the experience of feeling like a foreigner in a different country similar to grief. For myself, everything in my new life, if you want to call it that, felt foreign, uncomfortable, vulnerable and definitely scary at times, especially when I first arrived. I immediately felt like a stranger or outsider in a place where I did not belong. There are many times even now when I still feel this way.
As much as my grief often makes me feel out of place, it’s even more so a feeling of not just being a foreigner, but
A foreigner in my OWN country.
When grief strikes in a matter of an instant you don’t fit in where you used to. Everything that was familiar and comfortable about your home land, your life has been stripped away. You feel like you have been immersed in a new culture, a new language and finding it hard to communicate with the people you come in contact with. Yet, unlike in the foreign country where it can be obvious that you are a foreigner, in your home land you look like everyone else on the outside so no one has any clue that you feel like you don’t belong.
Grief changes everything. From the second that person wakes up to when they fall asleep on their pillow, if they can even manage to fall asleep, every aspect about their everyday life is and will never be the same as it was. From their shopping list they take to the grocery store, how much laundry they do in a week, to making reservations somewhere and forgetting that you aren’t a family of four anymore. Just like traveling takes time and experience to become familiar with different aspects of new locations, grief takes time as well. It takes time to feel less like an outsider or stranger in your home land, in your own life.
The more time and experience one has in the grief process the more manageable it starts to become. Yet, I know I will never master the process. I can only learn as time goes by and I continue to maneuver through this new life how to help myself feel less and less like a foreigner in my own land.
