Fellow Nomadic Soul, Welcome!

I’m Yaldaz Sadakova. I’m the creator of Foreignish, a space where I share personal essays about immigration.

For years, I’ve been a foreignish person—changing countries in the hopes of finding a place where I can belong and do meaningful work, but always ending up in that in-between state where I feel neither completely local and at home nor completely foreign.

That ambiguous state has been a source of much existential angst for me, so I’ve been aching to make sense of my foreignish experiences.

Experiences like feeling ashamed about forgetting my first language.

Having big career dreams crushed by immigration rules.

Desperately trying to hide my poverty as a foreign student in an Ivy League school.

Being constantly stumped by the “Where are you from?” question because the factually correct answer feels reductive.

Hearing my “foreign” name mispronounced all the time.

Leaving friends behind while moving from one place to another.

Being afraid of asking for a raise at work because that’s not part of the non-Western culture I was raised in.

Being bullied at work because of my precarious immigration status.

Feeling anxious and guilty for living thousands of miles away from my mom.

Finding my creative voice in a foreign language.

Stubborn Immigration Stories

I didn’t allow myself to write about these experiences for the longest time ever.

The journalist in me feared that no editor would possibly want to publish my personal stories about immigration because I’m a nobody.

But these stories wouldn’t leave me alone.

They kept growing and infecting my insides.

I kept feeling there was something related to immigration that I was supposed to be doing that I was not doing.

That feeling of wasted passion and unfulfilled potential was particularly strong whenever I walked by a community center helping immigrants or whenever I met somebody who worked in immigration.

Maybe I should ditch writing and journalism and go into social work or counseling so I can serve immigrants directly, I’d think at those moments.

But the thought of doing work that wouldn’t involve writing was stifling. I felt lost, blocked, adrift, angry, miserable.

Catharsis

Photo by Yaldaz Sadakova

When I finally allowed myself to write, I began to feel more healed and more self-aware.

I began to see that the most meaningful immigration work I could do was in the field of writing after all. It had just been a matter of starting—and self-publishing my writing instead of waiting for an editor to pick me.

I began to remove some of the anger, guilt and resentment I’d been attaching to my immigration experiences.

I began to see that belonging nowhere and being a perpetual outsider isn’t necessarily bad.

It can potentially provide radical freedom.

The freedom to reinvent yourself.

The freedom to stitch together an identity from various cultural and spiritual sources.

The freedom to see yourself and the world through a wider, more international lens.

The Dream

My big dream is to make Foreignish one of the best platforms for nuanced and relatable personal essays about the emotional experiences of immigration.

I want the Foreignish stories to be the kind of stories I wish I had come across back when I thought nobody feels like me—and, therefore, I must be weird or weak.

Why are the Foreignish memoir stories so long? Because you can’t go deep in 500 or 1,000 words.

So, if you have a long attention span and, like me, you’re always hungry to read about identity, belonging, otherness and borders, Foreignish is for you.

Share and Connect

If you love what you read here, please share it!

I’d love for the Foreignish stories to reach the wider world, so every single share and retweet matters.

To learn more about the experiences, books and people that inspire my stories here, connect with me on Facebook.

To get Foreignish stories in your inbox, subscribe to the Foreignish newsletter. I promise I won’t spam you.

Also, if you need a meaningful gift idea for an immigrant in your life who isn’t familiar with Foreignish, you can delight them with The Wrong Passport. This book is a collection of my long-form personal essays published here.

From Toronto, I’m sending you loving kindness, wherever you are. ♥