A friend recently told me she had to attend her grandaunt’s funeral on Zoom.
She said it casually; the way immigrants talk about tragedy now. She logged in, muted her mic, watched her family grieve in squares, and clicked “Leave Meeting” when it was over.
No one prepares you for the fact that immigration is not just relocation—it is absence becoming a life skill. It is grieving through screens. It is learning how to cry while behaving as if nothing is happening.
When my grandmother died last January—the matriarch, the woman whose voice shaped the women in my family—I wasn’t there. There were no Zoom links, no livestream, no printed obituary read aloud on my behalf. The day she was buried, I curled myself into the smallest version of my body and hated the day I moved to London.
This is the quiet cruelty no Welcome Pack mentions: You don’t just leave your country, you leave entire chapters of your life unwitnessed.
There are people like me; men and women stretched between geographies; who have watched families grow, break, heal, and rearrange through WhatsApp calls and pixelated memories. We meet nieces and nephews when they’re already walking and forming opinions. We learn about weddings through forwarded videos. We hear about deaths in group chats. We mourn alone, because time zones don’t pause for grief.
We left because staying felt like drowning. We left because opportunity was fiction where we came from. We left because the country loved to punish the people who tried to love it back. People call it “choice,” but survival is rarely a choice—it’s a negotiation.
The cost? You buy stability in pounds, CAD, euros, dollars, but you pay for it in absence.
A friend told me once about another immigrant in Germany—brilliant, lonely, and collapsing under untreated mental illness. Back home, someone would have noticed. Someone would have said, “this girl is not okay.” But abroad? She’s invisible. Doctors don’t hear her. They see her skin and assign her strength. They dismiss her pain because they don’t recognise it on a Black body.
Black people are strong. Black women? Stronger. Black immigrants? Indestructible. Always functioning, always coping, never breaking. Until they do, and there is no soft place for the break to land.
There’s another truth immigrants don’t say out loud: We fear our governments at home. We fear immigration officers abroad. We fear deportation; even the ones with paperwork. Because belonging is conditional. Visa stamps are conditional. Professional success is conditional. One mistake, one missed form, and the life you built can evaporate overnight.
There is hierarchy here, and we are at the bottom of it.
We sweep floors in countries where we were top of our class. We silence ourselves in rooms where our voices once shaped cities. We shrink to be tolerated.
That is the price of belonging: You can’t have it whole. If you stay home, you pay in safety, in opportunity, in the tension between genius and survival. If you leave, you pay in distance, in invisibility, in being perpetually “other”—useful enough to work, not valued enough to belong.
So, we live in the gap.
We love the country that made it impossible to stay, and endure countries that make it impossible to belong. We build homes in places we cannot claim, and dream of a home we may never return to. We become fluent in loss; learning how to hold people at arm’s length because history has taught us that leaving is inevitable.
And maybe that is the heaviest cost of all: Not knowing where you belong, but having to keep living as if you do.
Because what is the alternative? To unravel? To return to nothing?
No! We carry on.
We build soft homes in rented rooms. We create chosen family where blood cannot reach. We become our own witness—to births, deaths, becoming.
Immigration is not triumph. It is endurance. It is the quiet ache of loving two countries that cannot hold you. It is the grief of losing without being allowed to pause. It is the ability to mourn on mute, camera off, functioning.
And yet, somehow, we still hope. Still try. Still love. Still fight for a life that feels like our own.
Maybe that is our real superpower—not resilience, but continuity. We learn to build from pieces. We learn to become at home in ourselves.
We keep living even when we don’t yet know where we belong, because belonging, too, is something we are slowly learning to shape with our own hands.