Citizen of Nowhere
I was born on an island I don't like.
Italians knows what Sardinia is. Jojo fans do also. A friend of mine once joked that I was just like Diavolo because "you both really don't want anyone to know you're from Sardinia". It's kind of hard to explain to strangers when they comment "oh, that's such a beautiful place! Why would you ever want to leave?" because it really is a gorgeous place, and I'd like to love it as well.
People born and raised in small towns, islands or small countries with limited access to other places might understand, and when I talk about it with them it seems like they do: a beautiful prison is still a prison. "Prison" might be too big of a word, actually, but when you're a kid dreaming of somewhere else it's very easy to feel trapped. The same people for 18 years. The usual mindset coming up again and again. Some patterns seem inescapable unless you physically remove yourself from it all.
I moved to Northern Italy when I was 19 to study (and to live close to my then-girlfriend, now-wife) and it felt like a dream. You can take a train to anywhere! So many more different people, shops, opportunities! And yet something always feels off. It took me a lot of time to take residency there (5 years to be precise) because anytime I could see a doctor, get a haircut, or do some very specific things I'd default to "I'll wait until I get home". But what is home? When I finally did it, I had been with little to no ties to my hometown for quite some time. Nowadays, I just have my parents, a couple of relatives I'm not exactly in contact with, a single friend I can maybe meet up with sometimes, and we met for the first time when I'd been away from there for 10 years or so. To be honest, when I moved to what we back in Sardinia call "the continent", I couldn't wait to do so. It didn't feel like I was leaving home at all, more like going out to find one.
I've done a lot of work to hide my accent, though it comes out at times when I'm around other people from Sardinia for a long time or when I get too upset. In a vacuum, I think it's a sad thing to do. For me, I like when it's hard to point out where I'm from, and see how many guesses it takes to get it right (they usually give up). It's happened often that, as soon as someone knows I'm from Sardinia, the conversation becomes all about their holiday there. It's kind of annoying, especially when it ends up being my only defining feature. It's the same with people from there, actually: they discover you're from the same place as them, so you must be one of them. I used to act all proud and complain that no, I'm nothing like them, as if it was a bad thing. Nowadays, I think I was just ashamed.
I didn't have a very strong accent growing up, for some reason, and that felt off to a lot of my peers. I didn't learn the language1 because my parents didn't speak it at home; my mom told me time and time again that when she spoke it elsewhere2 people used to mock her and she didn't want me to suffer the same way. It took me a while to understand why that's so sad. Despite being born from a very Sardinian family, no mixed heritage that I know of, I've always felt like an outsider. I focused on getting out there instead of trying more to fit in, because that felt like the right thing to do. I even mocked those who did, I felt superior. What a dick.
Now I live abroad and I'm equally annoyed by Italians acting like Sardinians used to do with me: you're from where I'm from, so you must be just like me. I feel flattened by an assumption I'm not able to keep up with, because honestly any kind of nostalgia and cultural fondness I have for anything I grew up with feels like something I've manufactured to be part of something, if that makes any sense3. It feels like I'm always away from home, but if you ask me to point where home is on a world map I just can't answer.
I love reading up stories of immigrants who cherish their home culture, whose bonds with their loved ones are also a big part of it. To me they've always felt very disconnected, and I'm kind of jealous. I love stories about shared culture, communities, family and heritage, but they all seem like a distant fantasy when I try to think of me in the same framework... and while it was something that made me feel "special" when I was a child, now it just feels like a failure on my part. And kind of stupid to say out loud, because what am I even talking about? I gush about small endangered cultures and I can't even fit in the one I was born into? Am I going to complain for being the most boring immigrant category in a foreign country? Wahwahwah? I really hope I don't come off that way.
I used to think that I'd build my own home without trying to fit in anywhere, and I feel like the closest definition of "home" I had for myself is "among the people I love". Now, I'm not sure.
Sardinia has its own endangered language which is not taught in schools. I know it's a lot more common in small towns, but I honestly don't know how well does a city dweller (as I used to live pretty much in the capital) know the specific dialect of their area. I only know that when they used specific terms or whole sentences to drive a point home, I always felt lost...↩
She used to move around a lot when she was a child, so she was effectively often the only Sardinian in the room.↩
Doesn't help that I don't have a very good grasp on a lot of memories from my childhood and especially my teen years.↩