Bratislava (source: SME)
Andrea Sadloňová is a Slovak-born scientist who returned home after 19 years in the USA.
I have been wondering how to approach this topic for a couple of months now. Slovakia has experienced quite a tumultuous first half of 2018, so it has been difficult to frame my ideas in a way that sounds positive or uplifting. What Slovakia has been feeling this year is similar to the feelings I have been experiencing since my return to this region in 2015. I have been having happy moments with my family and friends but have also felt disappointment, anger and heartbreak, applicable to both experiences in Slovakia and Czechia.I have been wondering how to approach this topic for a couple of months now. Slovakia has experienced quite a tumultuous first half of 2018, so it has been difficult to frame my ideas in a way that sounds positive or uplifting. What Slovakia has been feeling this year is similar to the feelings I have been experiencing since my return to this region in 2015. I have been having happy moments with my family and friends but have also felt disappointment, anger and heartbreak, applicable to both experiences in Slovakia and Czechia.
The expat's dilemma
One possible reason for this is my long history as an expat. As any Slovak expat living overseas knows, you learn to rely on oneself, your abilities and the network you have built. You integrate, adapt, adjust and after exerting immense effort, reap the benefits. There is a direct relationship between the effort and the benefit. The Slovak person living overseas is capable of building their own brand and image.
However, when you’re living in your birth country, it gets personal. You cannot run away or pretend it’s some other strange country where people are just weird. At home, you realize that it is not possible to have control over variables because too many things are personal or beyond reach. There’s a strange difference between living in a foreign country and your own country; much like a loving person, your own country can hurt you and break you more because of the emotional attachments that make you vulnerable.
Problems with patriotism
Us expats care about our country. We wish for Slovakia’s brand to be strong, built on solid evidence. We want to offer something that is original, unique, interesting, innovative, inspirational, joyous, cool, peaceful, uplifting, and loving. We are ashamed of the second rate position that Slovakia is put in. We return and think because we did all these wonderful things overseas, we can do them at home until we realize there are forces that control many more things beyond our reach, that these forces are rooted in history, mindsets andbehaviorsthat are hard to work with. We can realign and reset goals for our own lives but doing this for a country we love it is like trying to move a continent from its place.
