Five years ago, I decided to move to Europe thinking it would be fun. But the experience has become unbearable for me personally. Your lifelong neighbors become strange aliens, it's hard to make friends because of the cultural barrier, you go from living in a decent house to a shitty apartment. On top of that, I can't help but feel like I'm not a person, but a political entity. For example, I avoid raising my voice too much for fear of some chud thinking badly of me—it's a type of anxiety that not even my shy self of five years ago would have unlocked. It may sound silly, but the truth is, something like this has left me unrecognizable from who I was a while ago. Traumatic experiences, my paranoia and my overawareness have turned me into someone with zero personality. Besides, back home, my family would have been able to pay for a private college. Not here. So now I'm pursuing a different kind of degree, which, while it guarantees me a job, also limits the maximum salary that I can earn. I don't know, I feel like I traded a comfortable life in a country where I belonged to a middle-class family for being a second-class citizen with the permanent label of "immigrant." I look at my old friends' social media feeds and can't help but compare their lives to my phantom existence. I've experienced some bad things, but I've never been suicidal. However, imagining that I'll be fifty years old without having outgrown my group of friends when I was sixteen makes me think my life isn't worth living.