After many years of living abroad I feel a real sense of sadness and loss when I visit Latvia. Sadness for being apart from the people I love. For the family children growing up so far from my own life. For my language so comfortable and effortless. For the unquestionable sense of belonging I feel deep in my being. For the harmony of earthy autumn colours. For the life I did not live.
Latvia is a wounded place. The Soviet occupation prevented healing from the madness of the Second World War. The subsequent fifty years of oppression inflicted further wounds, pain that still echoes from generation to generation. The grief is so severe many spend years in a state of self-medicated dissociation. These old wounds are passed down, their origins barely recognisable. It is up to the younger generations to find the space and strength to heal them.
Being alone for a prolonged period of time does something to your psyche. I was 21 when I arrived in UK. I quickly learned to grit my teeth and work through the pain of severance. The discomfort never went away, but it got tolerable. The longer I spent alone, the harder it became to connect to others. The more I tried to become accepted, the more I morphed into a caricature of someone I thought would be acceptable. No matter how hard I tried, I did not belong.
The paradox of loneliness is that it has nothing to do with being alone. Lonely people will tell you that. Feeling disconnected from those around you is loneliness. It is isolating. You become the other. Feeling rootless and displaced. All along there is a strong desire to connect, yet the space occupied by loneliness has a repelling nature that keeps people away from you.
For many years I have lived in a chronic state of loneliness, inhabiting an innate sense of not belonging. Humans have an inherent need for connection. That is how we have survived, gather and nurture. I never found my tribe and I worked hard to be ok with it. Now, being alone is both, my solace, and my purgatory. I am grounded in my independence. I find comfort in being alone and strive to embrace the world even when it feels lonely. Yet, when the darkness seeps in and I am no longer enough, I mourn the absence of a kind touch filled with unconditional acceptance.
Sometimes the grief got so severe it felt like I would never come out on the other side. I howled in denial for the lost ones as if my non-acceptance would restore the fracture and resurrect the departed. I still mourn the ghosts from the dreams that never were; they now live better lives with better people in better weather. I mourn. Something was always missing, somethings got lost.
My mother’s ancestors come from the soil, a simple people who worked the land for generations. As the light from ancient stars reach the night sky from millions of years ago, so does the blood of my foremothers rush in my veins, a relentless drive that forces me to work blood, sweat and tears. Even when fruitless and ruthless, the pathological diligence in my ancestry is seen as a virtue.
When I was little, I imagined taking photographs with my mind, because we were too poor to have a camera. Later, I learned about the world through photography. It allowed me to reflect on my own experiences and make sense of things. Perhaps the reason I am attracted to photography is because it is saturated with melancholy, which also happens to be the state of my mind.
Poverty is debilitating; once experienced, it leaves its scars for life. The trauma of deep-seated insecurity that comes with moving from one temporary place to another, the anxiety of absolute uncertainty and my mother’s despair for working endless hours yet being unable to cover the basics. Each cell in your body becomes hyper-vigilant and encoded for scarceness. I still feel deep shame and vulnerability around poverty. I struggle with resentment towards the ignorance of those who never knew not having.
It has taken many years to dissolve the layers of the person I thought I should be. I found that below the masquerade I already was all I could be. It was my fear that had built a fortress of projections to keep my vulnerable heart safe. It kept me safe before I had a choice. Now I gratefully let go of the fear for my heart no longer needs to be concealed.
My returns tend to be saturated with melancholy. Even though Latvia is my birth land, for a long while my home has been elsewhere. Stepping back into the place which remains equally as unchanged as unrecognisable, is disorientating, and unleashes an abundance of unresolved matter. I used to resist the overwhelming mountain of all things past that confronted my senses. This time tried allowing them to be.
“This will not save you” a wise woman once told me. This hard work, this routine, this exercise, diet, meditation. I had regimented and exerted myself in order to loosen the grip of my grief. If only I worked hard enough I could work myself to be worthy of the peace. The opposite was true. My routine tightened the hold while I was helplessly grasping, astray and unsavable.
This time I tried allowing. I held my sorrows in hope that allowing them to be would somehow save me.
Unlike the summers I have known, the heat forces us to spend most of our time indoors. The sun has burned away the grass leaving the soil naked and exhausted. This is not the place I came from.
The unbearable temperature adds tension to the growing burden I am trying to hold. I make more and more space for all that is surfacing until my intention gives way and I implode with questions that have been tormenting my unease. Why did I come here? What did I want?
Usually I travel alone, but now I bring my toddler who is an agreeable companion. She sleeps whilst we drive and is charming and sociable when we arrive.
I want her to form a bond with the people and the place I am from. I want her to sense belonging and my philopatric pull to return. I tell others, reassuringly, that I want her to develop her Latvian identity. Then I feel apprehensive realising I do not know what that means anymore. What does it mean to be Latvian? Why did I come here?
I speak Latvian with my daughter despite living in England. I tell myself this will enrich her, language is a gift, it is part of who she is.
Sometimes I hide my foreignness to put others at ease and speak English instead. Because it is not cool to be Latvian in the UK; the Eastern European; the migrant worker; the might as well be Polish; the stealing the jobs; the lesser than; not even working class; the prejudiced; the subconsciously biased;
Hostile Environment.
I did not give her a Latvian name so that it does not ring otherness every time it is pronounced. Where are you from? When are you going back?
Things that make me Latvian.
Superstition as a reflex. I will spit three times over my left shoulder to prevent something bad from happening. However I do believe there is an alchemy to life beyond our comprehension.
I am direct which is one of the UK’s deadliest sins.
I am crafty. My whole childhood involved creating things from what little was available. I am also good at crafts. It’s a thing.
I am reserved with people I don’t know. It is not normal to smile at strangers in Latvia.
I don’t small talk. It’s pointless. This can be unbearable for some people.
My love of nature comes from my pagan ancestry which honoured all that is living. The delusion of our separation from nature is making the humanity mentally ill.
The summer solstice or Jāņi in Latvia is a national holiday celebrating the shortest night and the longest day which forms an important part of our identity. A festivity bigger than Christmas sees people leave towns and cities for the countryside to perpetuate pagan rituals of bonfires, songs and flower crowns. It is a celebration of fertility which honours the circle of life and nature. A night of roaming the fields in search of a flowering fern, a mystical symbol for libido. The celebration culminates in a sunrise when the air is charged with potency and supernatural powers.
“What are you unwilling to feel?” a wise woman asked.
My grip was so tight it made my shoulders tense and knuckles white. It seemed like the obvious way to be because allowing would have meant a certain death.
I was terrified, yet there was no other way forward. I let go of holding. All around me was falling. A lifetime of denial. It did not kill me.
After my birth I was taken from my mother, tightly swaddled in a cloth and placed in a nursery with other newborns. For the following two weeks I saw my mother every four hours to breastfeed before being returned to my cot alone.
A hundred whales die stranded on a beach; A thousand people swept away with flood; Settlements bombed and children displaced; Animals perished; Wildfires everywhere. Everywhere. Famine. Drought. Biblical. Wild. We sit still, waiting. Observing. Signs of our times.