Why Immigration Was My First Personal Branding Strategy (Part 2)

(Read Part 1 of this Essay)

On a sunny morning of August, I grabbed my passport and threw my entire childhood room in our old Volkswagen Touran: every trinket, every beloved object — from synthesizer to guitar, art supplies to board games — came along as if they were lifeboats. The comfort of staying at a hotel was never an option for my penny-wise parents, so mom couldn’t really blame dad’s unhealthy decision to fuel his anticipation with six Red-Bull cans and drive us toward the threshold of a different world in one breath, only stopping at a gas station in Vienna for us to get some sleep in the car. We’ve traveled 2.200 km all the way to the Dutch political capital, The Hague.

On that final day with my family around me, each hug stretched a little too long, voices cracking on words too heavy to finish. I then found myself in my new room, alone in a way I’d never known. For the first time, my past was something distant, like the familiar hum of the Volkswagen’s engine, fading away. I wasn’t frightened; I was ravenous for the unknown. It was too early to grasp the oddity of thinking in two languages at the same time, of walking two lands at the same time.

In those first months, the city was brimming with novelty and promise. I entered my new hometown like a farmer stepping into a supermarket for the first time, eyes wide, staring at every item neatly packaged, curated, and glowing under artificial light. The pristine streets and seductive autonomy felt more like a glossy advertisement than real life. Life there was meticulously arranged—a society groomed for efficiency and silent order.

Everything was well-orchestrated: Tesla cars operating on perfectly smooth roads, throngs of tourists walking the shopping streets, glasses of wine clinking outside luxury restaurants, live jazz music resonating from the inside of noisy bars, vibrant posters advertising the next contemporary exhibit at some museum… I inhaled this atmosphere like oxygen, breathing in the city’s affluence and ease. Those streets were different — pedestrian, manicured, predictable, and its people radiated an aura of ‘jantelagen’ mixed with nonchalance.

There was no clear difference between the authorities and the public, the rich and the poor — most of them wore second-hand clothes, rode rusty bikes to work every morning, and bought discounted supermarket food. In the shire of my world, the rich ruled the streets with expensive cars and cheap politics, and the poor rode the cramped bus home and watched them lie on TV.

In its meticulously ordered way of life, The Hague exposed my quiet loyalty to a place whose roughness I’d always taken for granted. The difference wasn’t merely cultural — it was ideological. A collision between the structured, manicured West and the raw, brutalist East. My westward migration marked the symbolic transition: from Homo Post-Sovieticus, shaped by history’s leftovers, to the model citizen of a Brave New Europe — polished, eager, and ideologically rebranded.

The university building was like some old haunted mansion, built way before our great-grandparents were born, full of ghosts of art students from a hundred years back, their whispers in every corner, watching us mess up and try again.

Much like Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, every room offered a new marvel — a different way to conjure something from nothing: wood, metal, etching, silkscreen, RISO print. It was all there, laid out like a feast for the hungry and the curious. Arrogance was the price of admission. You had to have it if you wanted to thrive, impress yourself, and seduce your teachers. Middle school religion lessons taught us arrogance was a sin; here it was the main currency, and if you didn’t have it, you had to fake it. Make an idol out of fear, call that God.

We were freaks and geeks, weirdos and narcissists, brilliant and broken, all of us with our own neuroses, our heads full of voices. You could reinvent yourself by lunch and tear it all down by nightfall. We were children with half-formed histories and ideological hangovers, hacking identities into ourselves like bark-stripped trees — obsessed with becoming, as if authenticity were a birthright. And somehow, in the noise and narcissism of it all, the chaos felt like clarity.

It felt like we were doing something that mattered as long as we could stain the innocence of a blank canvas with some kind of truth. We were hungry for a desired future state, defiant, and fragile. And that, I think, was the magic. It was special to be alive in that corner of time. To be young, foreign, half-feral with hunger for beauty, in a place of absolute freedom. You could stretch the self into a new shape, and the world would respond.

We were far enough from home that we could reinvent ourselves from scratch — be whatever we wanted, except from normal, as long as it fit within Dutch law. To be normal to us, art students, was a disaster.

The academy was an island away from reality, each day a continuation of one’s own psychedelic trip powered by caffeine, THC, and toasties. A landscape for discovery, an invitation to confront the deepest traumas, fears and desires. No amount of words, music, or film stills can really catch the pulse of it — that sense of being cracked open, raw, and fully alive in that strange pocket of time, year of 2015.

It awakened a hunger for knowledge, burning like a fire in my gut, this drive to see, to hear, to absorb every possible thing that could soothe my inner displacement. With urgency, I pursued every university subject and art form tied to it — painting, sculpture, photography, sound design, cinema, philosophy — as if total immersion might grant clarity in a collapsing world. But absolute wisdom is too colossal and there was too much of it to cover and not enough lifetimes. If only life came tucked in desktop folders — one for each passion, each half-lived dream — filed neatly and waiting, untouched by the price of time, ready to open whenever we pleased…

Art school was nothing but a therapy session I’d accidentally walked into. It became my first real home — the apartment was just where the bed lived. On weekdays, I was surrounded by people from every corner of the world — orbiting the same studios and libraries, messing around, studying, and pretending we knew what it all meant. But then the weekend would roll in, and with it came the silence — thick as the mist outside, pressing down like an invisible weight.

As the months wore on, the initial rush faded, and I settled into the dull cadence of repetition — study, sleep, repeat. Each day made me more eager to escape the mechanical cadence of my life there, the relentless march of scheduled existence that cities demand. I found myself missing nature — the quietness of trees, the vastness of a starlit sky.

The modern city became a sophisticated kind of cage, where nature isn’t within arm’s reach and where people seem to survive through curated dopamine rushes: overstimulated nightlife, impulse online purchases, meaningless hookups.

Looking for a lover felt no different than applying for a job — and the job usually lasted longer. And friendships? Friendships required calendar invites weeks in advance! Big cities work on the assumption that strangers never meet twice. Back East, I used to greet every person coming my way. Here, I was ignoring thousands of people daily.

Here, under the clouded, overcast light, I felt my own mind shadowed, prone to worries I could neither explain nor shake — a feeling that no medicine or technology could resolve, a pull of something undefined, an itch I couldn’t scratch.

My longing spoke with the same voice that called my mother back to her parents’ village each weekend, after a week at the city college. With the passage of time, the places you think you don’t want to see anymore become the ones you can’t wait to go back to. Memories are nothing but guests checking out of the grand hotel called the mind, out of which, some, occasionally come back.

Enough time will pass until you know that what you left there has sprouted and is howling your name. We underestimate the power of nostalgia, one of the biggest human weaknesses; it’s not mere sentimentality but a gnawing reminder of a face of happiness we no longer inhabit. It’s like a bad toothache you’re never free of unless you go back in time.

The first year of migration unearths a relentless dissonance between the life you left and the one you’ve entered. To leave behind familiarity and to adapt without reminiscing is nearly impossible. The awareness that develops is akin to gaining a second sight. Each thing becomes a relic seen from a distance, and yet it lingers with painful clarity.

In my empty room, my old life surfaced in flashes: a phone call from my mother, her voice more brittle than I remembered; the smell of earth after rain; the memory of the red roses and peony we’d tended year after year, waiting for some kind of return.

There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness in being displaced — a quiet, almost seductive discomfort that deepens with time. In this unfamiliar space, I felt like a fragment of myself — untethered, uncertain. What was once a chapter of pride in self-discovery began to reveal its edges, exposing a shadow of disconnection.

In the haze of a Dutch dawn, with the first light creeping over the city’s skyline, I realized that I was no longer a student in a foreign country, I was an adult torn between two edges of a continent.

Aryna

Logo & Brand Designer.

https://www.arynadesigns.com
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Why Immigration Was My First Personal Branding Strategy (Part 1)