Saudade

I've been trying to write this post for 9 months. I could never get past writing a handful of words on it, but the idea of writing about Saudade has been bouncing around in my head constantly since then. The feeling was there, but the words just wouldn't come out.

Saudade is a Portuguese word that, at least in Brazil, is kinda special to us. There is a widespread myth that it is a word that only exists in our language, and even though that's not true, I like to think that at least the sheer amount of meanings we give it is somewhat unique.

If you don't speak Portuguese, it's hard to explain what the word is. Wikipedia has a definition I like: "Saudade describes a mix of feelings of loss, longing, distance and love". I highlighted that last word because while the first three are usually associated with something negative, love surely is not. And that's true for Saudade as well — while it can definitely mean something negative, there's a strong positive feeling attached to it as well.

It makes sense, then, that this post's tone kept morphing between those same four points.

Loss

It started as a melancholic reflection on being away from home, not fitting in, and feeling like a part of me was missing. And in a way, it's still that. When I wrote Belonging Somewhere, 3 years ago, I was making sense of both old and new information and realizing that my true home was where I'd been all along. Moving away from it was never gonna be painless.

I miss my family, my friends, watching the Juventude games, the food and the weather. I also miss speaking my mother tongue when leaving my house, and I miss having the knowledge of how things work, what to expect, what counts as rude and what counts as weird. The mental tax of minor things in life is already high to brains like mine, but when all the things I've spent 30 years learning change at once, it can easily become unbearable.

Longing

Naturally, this evolved into the constant, nagging feeling of being in the wrong place. "What am I doing here? Why did I do this? I just wanna go home!". I think it's a perfectly natural feeling to have, and I don't blame myself for feeling that way. I started longing for home and how everything was back there, and anything here that was different sucked.

But it is a slippery slope and if you don't realize what you're doing it can easily lead into an idealization of the past and ruining your present completely.

Distance

Time, therapy and good company heal all, so eventually that longing started to cease and my mind started to distance itself from home a little bit. Not that I stopped thinking about it; I just realized that it was no longer a part of my present. The distance that exists in the literal sense needs to exist in the metaphorical one too, otherwise I'll never be able to enjoy what I'm living right now.

I started to go out more and got to know a lot of beautiful places around here (winter being over also played a big part in that). Lecco is a really cool place! And there's even cooler things right near it. So much history, art, landscapes, or even just an interesting different culture to experience. It felt weird at first to allow myself to appreciate a culture that isn't mine — a mental barrier I have that makes experimenting with new things very difficult — but as I got used to it, it all became more enjoyable.

Once the longing stopped and I accepted that the distance exists, I was able to create a routine that keeps me stable and do activities that are enriching, like sightseeing in an unknown place. Which is not that different from what I started doing 3 years ago, when I was stable at home and started getting to know a lot of beautiful places back there.

Love

All this process led to the best meaning of Saudade: love. I still miss my home very much and I'm looking forward to being back, but I now look at it in a much healthier way: instead of it being the only place for me, or the panacea to all my problems, it is now "just" a place that holds things I love, that made me very happy in the past. And isn't it great that I have something to look back fondly to?

I'm no longer letting Saudade be a barrier that stops me from enjoying my new life here. Instead, I am choosing to make my present worth feeling Saudade for.

Wrapping up

Defining ourselves can be pretty hard. We often take shortcuts by describing our jobs, where we're from, our family status or our hobbies, but the reality is that we're much more than that. We are the sum of everything we've ever done and experienced. Our childhood home, our family, the best and worst moments we've had, but also what we're experiencing right now.

When I wrote about longterm goals (or rather, the lack of them), I mentioned it being unfair of me to decide now what future me is gonna do. "Future you has a way better idea of what they want than present you does", I said. When I first started thinking about this post, I was doing the total opposite of that. I was letting dumb old me decide for future me based on information I had back then, but I know so much more now. I'm glad I got back on track.

Finally getting to write it means a lot to me, as the last year hasn't been easy, though it was definitely fulfilling. Wherever you are, I hope you have things worth feeling Saudade for =)