By Nitya Amalean
It was the year 2020. When most of the world was lacking connection and normalcy, I had the privilege of being in Sri Lanka, an island that I had referred to as ‘home’ but hadn’t truly been my home since I left at the age of eighteen. Being here gave me connection with a sugary coat of ‘normalcy’. I had my affectionate family, who made lockdowns entertaining with the purchase of a ping pong table, the nightly binge of true crime documentaries and the occasional games night, including a terrible decision to play ‘Cards Against Humanity’. I had a relationship with my boyfriend in all the physical sense of the word after two years of long-distance phone calls. I had my friends who were all a 15-minute drive away. I had a flexible job where I could interact with smart and passionate coworkers, something I ignorantly thought I wouldn’t find in Sri Lanka. Add to that, countless long weekends and public holidays, mostly spent in the beach towns down south, a region brimming with excellent food options, tasty cocktail bars and magnificent sea swims – truly this was an island that brought comfort, safety and security.
But I wanted more.
This romanticised version of the pandemic years spent in Sri Lanka, while all true, evoked such strong feelings of being lost, purposeless, and devoid of self-worth. This most comfortable of comfort zones made me feel completely out of sorts and yearning for something different. Long, sleepless nights of overthinking, questioning and wondering, “What on earth am I doing here?” Did I spend four years in an exceedingly difficult academic environment and four years working in the most ambitious, individualistic, enlightening city to land up here? Did my parents really spend thousands of dollars on American college tuition for me to end up back home feeling like a failure?
The initial move back home in May 2020 was going to be temporary. I was placed on furlough from my job in London and I believed it was best to wait it out back home. I thought that once the pandemic was all well and done, which would obviously be in a few months, I’d return to London, like nothing had changed.
As I fell in deeper with the aesthetically pleasing confines of beautiful beaches in Trincomalee, the delicious home-cooked meals, the hugs from my parents, the kisses from my boyfriend, the cuddles with my little nieces and nephews, and the long weekend trips with friends, it would be an outright lie to say I wasn’t relieved when the furlough continued and ultimately, ended with the expiration of my work visa. That seemed to seal the decision. I had no way back to the United Kingdom. Sri Lanka was to be my home now.
Looking back at that time, it was like being given this Trojan horse of a cozy, tender, warm embrace, disguising claws that pierced slowly, leaking poison and disillusionment. The surrounding Indian Ocean was as confining as it was endless, as isolating as it was welcoming, as suffocating as it was refreshing.
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Scrolling through social media, I compared myself to others. And no, it wasn’t the mindless glazing-of-the-eyes watching Tik Tok or Reels but the reading-every-post-with-anxiety on LinkedIn. I compared myself to my friends in New York City, progressively moving up the ladder with impressive promotions and new six figure salaries. I compared myself to my best friends, living their lives independently, powering through their work passionately. I compared myself to peers in my graduating class who seemed to be smashing it in whatever life path they were on. And I felt thoroughly sorry for myself.
While pleased to be working with smart individuals at my WFH startup job in Sri Lanka, the lack of growth and opportunity for professional development made me itch. There were too many moments in the middle of workdays, where I laid sprawled across my bed, staring up at the fan and berating myself down a black hole. I switched between two toxic mindsets, one telling myself that I was no longer worthy of doing exciting, cutting-edge, fulfilling work and the other questioning why I couldn’t be content with all the positives that I had around me? Why did I always want more? Why did I always have this “grass will be greener” frame of mind? Why couldn’t I just ‘be’? This second mindset would set in when I heard my mum’s call to come for her home-cooked lunch of rice and curry. Wasn’t I begging for all these luxuries when I was living abroad?
While work was a huge factor contributing to my discontent, lifestyle was a secondary, significant reason. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer that everyone has different priorities and are in different stages of life and I spent a lot of time (over)thinking about my priorities. I wanted new experiences. I wanted to be pushed outside my comfort zone to do things that terrified my introverted self. I wanted to work remotely from a Greek island. I wanted to pick up Spanish again and stay in Barcelona for the summer. I wanted to take a creative writing course in Paris. I wanted to hop on a flight and visit my best friend in Munich, where she was living on a farm. I wanted the luxury of having a multiple-year multiple-entry Schengen visa which would be stamped every few months. I wanted a different passport. I wanted to go for an innumerable amount of plays, whether they were in small, 30-seater spaces with no set design or in beautiful, historic theatres where the lead actor is naked almost the entire run time (for artistic purposes apparently). I wanted to watch Jodie Comer in Prima Facie. I wanted to laugh hysterically at a live interview with the legendary Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I wanted to listen to the beautiful minds of Konkona Sen Sharma, Nandita Das and Aparna Sen discussing the perils of censorship in their films in India; watch a match at Wimbledon; find a way to go to the Berlinnale Film Festival. Enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
I wanted to do so many things.
Could I find these things while living in Sri Lanka? I convinced myself that I couldn’t.
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Recently, at my one-year work anniversary in my current job, my manager thoughtfully said, “Thank you for always striving for excellence.” While very kind words, they made me understand something I perhaps always knew about myself, without ever being explicitly told. Always striving for excellence even as a type-A young person, pushing for excellent grades, in order to go to an excellent college in the United States, and ultimately, secure an excellent job. (I’m exhausted just typing out this sentence.) And after being extremely fortunate to work with intelligent and supportive people and have challenging, exciting projects, my own benchmark for excellence kept rising.
I wanted to really enjoy my work but also be challenged by it. I wanted to learn from diverse, brilliant colleagues. I wanted to learn new technical skills. I wanted to have workshops with Product teams on developing new AI functionalities and how best to position them in the marketplace. I wanted to brainstorm with the Content team on how to best partner with a certain Tamil British-Indian actress and not feel like the token voice of diversity. I wanted the promotion and the salary bump and the senior title and the recognition and the reputation. And if not now, then it was in the five-year plan. I can say that this is what New York City does to you, but that would be a lie. It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.
All this ambition drove me straight into a brick wall, dissolving my confidence in my own capabilities. I blamed Sri Lanka. I blamed a whole country for making me feel like this.
Soon, the island was facing its worst economic crisis since independence and to watch the destruction of possibility, willpower and any minute form of political stability in real time was heartbreaking. I won’t even attempt to put into words the plight of Sri Lankans who lost almost everything, unable to access the most basic essentials of fuel, electricity, cooking oil, milk powder and medicines. By early 2022, ‘home’, an island that had nurtured me, that gave me the most special roots, that offered me safety and security, was broken. In my siloed social bubble of international school kids, foreign-educated graduates and Colombo’s upper-middle class families, I desperately wanted to get out. And so did thousands of others who did not want to waste their potential in a nation that was falling apart at the seams.
After years of only regarding Sri Lanka with fondness, I found that bitterness, resentment, and animosity towards my island nation magnified to a point where I couldn’t even hold a conversation with friends who could leave but were choosing to stay. Give me a work permit, give me a Western passport, give me a student visa, give me anything that will allow me to leave this place.
A family meeting was called when my black mood permeated through the home, along with wine, cheese, and a whiteboard to discuss my future plans — the pleasures of coming from a business family — efficient but with alcohol. My family, the ever-loving, supportive, encouraging guiding lights in my life, told me point-black, “You need to leave.” In an atypical South Asian, fashion, they said, “Do what makes you happy. Get a job or do your Masters. Travel everywhere.” My sweet parents, knowing that they would once again be empty nesters with my brother and me elsewhere, knowing that they fully enjoyed having the house full again, also recognised that their kids would be their happiest selves outside of Sri Lanka.
To have diametrically opposing emotions about the right path forward is confusing to say the very least. If I chose to remain in Sri Lanka, it would have been because three people lived there. My parents were not getting any younger and more substantially, we treasured each other. My partner and I were finally living in the same city after years of distance and savouring every moment of togetherness. And to have all three people only having words of encouragement further deepened the guilt.
But I wanted to be selfish. I didn’t want to stay because I’m a patriotic citizen contributing to the brain drain. I didn’t want to stay because I’m a good daughter or girlfriend. I wanted to leverage my resources, my experiences and most importantly, my LinkedIn, to do the impossible. A broken island meant I had to put together the pieces. For myself.
To leave or not to leave? And to which part of the world? To return back to the country where I have the privilege of residency but do I want to live in the land of mass shootings and a work-till-you-die mentality? Or to pursue an entry into the U.K. through a student visa by doing an unwanted MBA? Or to strive for the most idealistic, unrealistic scenario — a job in London?
But in that snug, tightly wrapped, a-little-too-hot Anokhi[1] blanket of a comfort zone, the decision was always clear. Maybe one day, I’ll make my peace with my ‘home’. Maybe one day, my blood won’t boil with frustration when I’m on Sri Lankan soil for more than a fortnight. Maybe one day, I will feel the affection again. Maybe one day.
Fast forward two years to the present day, sitting in my cozy flat in London, having just spent a few electrifying weeks in Greece, riding on a high from a successful partnership with a certain tech juggernaut, and preparing for next week’s launch of a new AI product, I appreciate my new ‘home’. It might not be the island I once thought I would spend the rest of my life in, and it’s a little colder and gloomier than the tropics. But the possibilities are endless once again, my dreams are daring once again, and life is feeling full once again
[1] Anokhi Quilt
Nitya Amalean is an emerging writer and storyteller. She was born and nurtured in Sri Lanka, college-educated in the United States and currently, lives in London where she works for an audio media company.
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