Content 12+ It’s an unusual life we lead, those of us who’ve left our countries not by choice, but by a quiet compulsion, a sense of necessity—a feeling that there’s no longer a place for us where we started. Some might say we live in self-imposed exile, but I’d call it something else. I’d call it seeking. Not in the wandering way of a lost soul, but with a kind of hard-won determination. We’re seekers of a future in a place we once would have never chosen, yet a place we now want to claim.
Six years ago, I arrived in Hungary. And in that instant, I wasn’t just an arrival; I was a departure. I was leaving a career I’d built with careful effort, piece by piece, only to dismantle it by three levels, an uncomfortable demotion that felt almost like an accusation against my past self. I came for stability in an unstable world, a stability my homeland could no longer offer. Yet stability has its own price, and here it was paid in status, in familiarity, in comfort. I was moving to a place I hadn’t chosen, for reasons that seemed unavoidable, toward a future that felt uncertain.
But Hungary had chosen me, and that, at least, I could hold on to.
The first year was the hardest. I clung to my new job, but it felt almost as foreign as the language around me. I started to wonder if this was really my life, or if I’d somehow stepped into someone else’s story. Every interaction, every passing conversation in a language I barely understood, was a reminder that I was an outsider. People were kind, but kindness only highlights the distance when you’re painfully aware of it. I felt like a spectator to my own life, watching myself try to carve out a niche, but the walls kept shifting, as if my world were built on sand.
And there was the matter of the visa, that tenuous slip of paper binding me to my employer with invisible chains. My freedom was bound to my job, my stay contingent on someone else’s decision to let me stay. I never stopped wondering: What if it’s taken away? What if one day I have to leave and go back, back to a country that doesn’t feel like mine anymore? The paradox is clear to me, even now. I’m far from home, but closer than I’ve ever been to the life I want.
People often ask why I don’t go back. It’s a fair question, I suppose. And yet, my answer is simple: I don’t feel at home there. Over time, the subtle divergence between me and my homeland became a gulf. My views shifted, my values took root in a different soil, and soon I was no longer the person I had been. I felt less like a Russian and more like a stranger. At some point, I stopped missing what I had left behind, and I began to see the possibility of building something new here, among people I never imagined I’d meet, in a culture I never expected to embrace.
That doesn’t mean I don’t meet others from my homeland, people who have come here more recently, seeking refuge from war and conscription. They arrive with fresh scars, and I understand their pain, though I can’t help but notice that their reasons are different. They’ve left in haste, driven by fear rather than hope, and while I see myself in them, I also feel a growing distance. My journey has been one of seeking something new, while theirs is often an escape from something intolerable. It’s a fine line, perhaps, but one that has reshaped my own perspective. I see that, for many, their hearts still belong to the country they’ve left, even if they can no longer stand to live there. But I no longer feel that pull. I have looked forward for too long.
The language, the customs, the culture here—all these were hurdles, once. Now they’re simply life, and I realize that embracing them was never just a matter of adaptation; it was a matter of survival. I took to learning the language, one word at a time, one halting conversation after another. I began to feel less like an alien and more like a part of the living, breathing rhythm of this place. The sounds of the streets, the quiet rituals of daily life, they have a texture I didn’t notice at first. But they’re woven into the fabric of who I am now. I’ve found an identity here that, ironically, feels more authentic than the one I left behind.
I don’t know if things will ever change in my home country. Sometimes, I think that change is inevitable; other times, I wonder if it is hopeless. But that is not where my future lies. I have learned not to place my hopes in a place I no longer recognize. I have learned that looking forward is the only way I can continue building a life that is mine. I have learned that there is a kind of peace in the act of letting go.
There is a beauty in staying, even when you feel you were never meant to stay. There is grace in accepting what you did not choose, in making peace with the strange and unexpected, and in finding yourself among people who once felt foreign, but who now feel like family. And perhaps this is the truest lesson of all: Home is not a place; it is a commitment. It is the promise we make to ourselves to keep going, to keep building, to keep finding meaning in the unlikeliest of places.
To those of you who have never left, it might seem strange. You might see us as lost, as misplaced, as wanderers who drift between worlds. But we’re something else entirely. We are the builders of new lives, the architects of a kind of freedom that only comes when you leave what you know behind. We are not lost. We are simply learning to belong, in a place that—unexpectedly, perhaps—is beginning to belong to us as well.
And for me, that is enough.
