We Are All Migrants: Reflections on the Experience of Migration

Recently, I had a conversation with someone who said to me (I am paraphrasing): “when you come from where I am from, Canada is a mile away from heaven”. I have been sitting with that sentence all week and reflecting on the privileges that I have received as a result of moving to Canada. I thought I would reflect on this in our blog this week, in case anyone reading this can relate.

Remembering My Personal Migration

I came to this country from Pakistan when I was 6 years old. I have some odd memories from that time. The first snack I ever ate in Canada was Maltesers chocolate. The first food I ate was Tasti Taters. To this day, those foods hold a nostalgic memory for me.

I’ve been reflecting on my own migration lately because someone else recently asked me what my favourite books are and it prompted me to revisit one of my favourites: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.

The book is largely centered around the evolving love story of Saeed and Nadia, but in the background it is a story about migration. Hamid draws an interesting parallel between the changes that occur in a romantic relationship and the changes that occur as a result of migration. There is a simple sentence in the book that captures the main ethos he is trying to convey: “we are all migrants through time”. I love this idea.

Migration as a Universal Experience

We live in a time where there is a lot of discourse around migrants, immigration, and refugees, but rarely are we talking about the lived experience of migration. In the book, Hamid resists the idea that migration is an exceptional experience that some people have. Instead, he defines it as a human norm. This especially makes sense when you view it from the lens that migration is not just about crossing borders–it can be about aging, changing, grieving, and evolving. Everyone is experiencing those things. Everyone is migrating through their own timeline.

I wonder what difference it would make to view the experience of migration from this perspective?

Migration and the Grief of Change

There is another line I like from the book: “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind”. It’s a daring way to express the idea that moving toward something new results in the loss of something old. I find this line to be relevant when it comes to talking about any kind of personal change. Particularly, the grief that can come with change. Change is a topic that gets discussed a lot in therapy and not only with respect to migration, but also in the context of any major shift in life: marriage, divorce, career changes, parenthood, etc. When a major shift happens, we have to let go of our old lives in order to welcome the new.

Exit West is a meditation on how we change, how we outgrow our homes and even each other, and how something like love or safety can be at once transitory and deeply real.

More Questions to Contemplate

As I sat with these ideas and revisited this book, some more questions emerged:

• Can love survive constant reinvention?

• Can identity root itself in motion?

• Are the borders we defend mere illusions?

• How do we find or make a “home” when home disappears?

I don’t have the answers, but life and therapy are not always about having answers. Sometimes simply noticing the questions that come up can be a useful exercise. I will be taking some time to reflect on these questions this week. I hope you also find a text (a book, a film, a song, whatever it may be) that inspires you to think deeply about some aspect of human life that we don’t often take the time to examine.

Have you read Exit West? Have thoughts on the questions above? 

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