When There is a Crisis at Home
By: Alecia Aubin
Tags: Travel, Mental Health, Friendship, Expat, BlackLivesMatter

When There is a Crisis at Home

Navigating isolation as a black expat in Budapest

Blue Monday by Annie Lee

Ten days after George Floyd was murdered and nine days after police brutality protests erupted in cities across America and around the world, a colleague of mine asked me how I was feeling.

I had just returned to the office after almost three months of working from home — and I was riddled with anxiety. For the first two days, I barely left the confines of my office. I didn’t venture to the other floors, and I barely spoke to a soul. I was skittish about returning to an environment where my health and well being were heavily dependent on the cautiousness or carelessness of others. I was trapped in a cycle of handwashing and surface wiping.

I wore my mask and sometimes my gloves whenever I had to venture outside my office and was often viewed as being overly cautious and a little too paranoid about a virus that barely reared its head in the Hungarian capital. At that point, I had long ceased any attempt to explain why I was so cautious. I stopped trying to explain that I, a Black Woman from Far Rockaway, Queens, — one of America’s deadliest zip codes for COVID-19 — refuse to be cavalier about a virus that was primarily killing people that looks just like me.

In addition to my nervous return to the office, I was mentally exhausted after watching another crisis unfold at home. So when my colleague asked me how I was doing, I heaved a sigh of relief. I didn’t realize how much I needed someone to ask me that question; how much I needed someone within my Organization to acknowledge the turmoil and terror that Black people at home were currently experiencing.

Photo by Leighann Blackwood on Unsplash

Living as a Black expat in Central Europe has its daily challenges, but the biggest challenge is the isolation you feel when there is a crisis at home. For me, the burden is more substantial when the turmoil at home is having an impact on people within my community.

Since I arrived in Budapest in 2014, there have been numerous crises at home that continue to take a toll on Black communities across America. The most prominent of these events include the death of Michael Brown Jr., the death of Sandra Bland, the political environment, the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of Breonna Taylor, and the murder of George Floyd and the protests that have since erupted across America and the world. All these events continue to have a profoundly negative impact on the cumulative psyche and the mental health of Black Americans and Black people across the diaspora.

Being an expat (especially in a majority white homogenous country) often means that you are traversing and experiencing these traumatic events alone. And like many Black professionals who work in primarily white spaces, some Black expats carry within themselves a duality of being. It’s a duality honed and perfected over years that is easily called forth — it comes by rote — and many have become adept at maintaining and performing it. It is a performance akin to psychological code-switching — a forced assimilation that encompasses not just language but the entire being. It robs you of peace and dignity; it permeates the bones and takes a tremendous toll.