Why Immigration Was My First Personal Branding Strategy (Part 1)
Migration is never just a matter of packing suitcases and booking flights; it’s a subtle, self-imposed exile, an almost surgical cutting away from the life that bore you. It’s a rebirth — a shedding of skin that doesn’t yet realize how much it clings to the old life. The unexamined reasons for my leaving in 2015 festered, ignored yet persistent, like an unnoticed spider tucked in the shadow of my room in Australia, watching over my restless sleep. Moldova was a dusty photograph, an old coat hung up too long in the closet.
One cannot comprehend the nature of home until dragged out of it, into the gleaming halls of an alien culture. The nation in which we’re born isn’t an anchor but a launching pad, and to live in the same mold would be to betray our own potential for expansion. To emigrate is to feel the pull of a magnetic otherness, to sense the contours of who we are by tearing ourselves away from the landscape of our origins. Leaving is a scene we play out a thousand ways before we ever do it. It’s something the spirit accomplished before the body could catch up.
Growing up, I was a child of satellite TV and the internet, mediated through flickering images of a West that glowed with possibility. My generation’s world expanded in stages: first on a screen, then in a first-world country. In Moldova, making it out has become its own kind of myth, a modern tale of heroism told in whispers: “One day, we’ll leave.” Just like in America people dream of making it out of the ghetto, in Moldova people dream of making it out of Eastern Europe. When there is no way of making it out of there, the dream becomes to transform it. I happened to have a way.
My parents’ insistence on university abroad became an insistent drumbeat: “There’s no future here. Don’t you want something better?” They had long understood the appeal of life beyond our borders, they bore the burden of knowledge and the dream of escape, having lived through both anarchy and poverty, and worst of all, generational hopes. My teenage years were occupied with other concerns, like learning how to improvise blues on my guitar and master Adobe Photoshop; the notion of an adult life was so distant it seemed abstract.
I believed in the pursuit within our frontiers, never imagining I’d venture beyond them. We lived in an upper-middle-class house ringed by gardens of flowers, its yard teeming with fruit trees, vegetables, and the welcoming bark of our German Shepherd dog. The suburban life, with its half measures — a little bit city, a little bit village — felt as close to paradise as any 18-year-old could imagine. The sacrifice that went into building that house was vast, on a land large enough for another potential house, of my own or my sister’s, taking my parents thirteen years to pay off.
And yet, like many middle-class children in a developing country, I had been conditioned by the implicit threat that, without drive and purpose, I’d find myself one day sitting on an upside down plastic bucket and selling sunflower seeds for pennies at the market. The shame of failure was woven into our family, staying behind meant little more than wasted potential. For my older cousins who had already gone West, the cycle was complete: education, settlement, permanence.
Before digital media, families were leaving together, transplanting their lives in unison. Now, in the vast, dispersed diasporas of our time, the family bond is stretched by technologies that make distance bearable without ever truly bridging it. Today, we move as individuals, seeking enlightenment, opportunity, escape. Migration is not some modern glitch; it’s an art of duality, a primal urge encoded in our marrow.
Within decades of mass-exodus, Moldovans have spread like spores, growing out of the ashes of social injustice like mushrooms in forests. The 2011 blue passport* granted a release valve, an official recognition of our right to mobility, it was a symbol of both opportunity and Soviet decay, a document marking departures rather than returns. The world seemed to open, not like a door, but like a precipice. Each migrant carried with them a smoldering dissatisfaction, a recognition that staying would mean a kind of quiet expiration.
The question of “how was school?” transformed itself into “have you applied yet?” Every family conversation was a reminder that my potential was something to be exported, that our country’s role was to give us the basic manners, then send us off to build lives elsewhere. My final year of high school, once centered on daily studies, became a countdown to leaving. My parents’ insistence felt necessary, a calling I couldn’t refuse. Yet I wasn’t too sure why my parents would willingly fund my undiscovered talents abroad. Those wings I have been given were their dream, an amulet of hope, purpose, pride. But like most plans rooted in dreams, it was only half-thought-out.
The agreement to leave felt less like a journey and more like a divorce — an identity suspended between two poles, carrying uncertain commitment to an uncertain future. An acceptance letter to a preparatory program in the Netherlands came like a bolt of liberation. I was on my way to the vibrant hub of art, culture, and mythic freedoms. The very prolonged negotiation between two conflicting selves had been quickly resolved by the irresistible promise of independence. There was the girl shaped by the Moldovan soil and history, and there was the unformed woman, beckoned by Western Europe’s mysterious maze. Leaving Moldova was my initiation, an intoxicating entrance into adulthood.
