-You'll have to eat shit before you can succeed-. It took me years to dimension the weight of every word in that phrase.
I had heard that thought in so many situations, but that morning in particular, it resonated with me. It resonated with what I was starting to experience.
I was just queueing at the Embassy to vote for who I thought should be the president of Colombia. You feel two different energies, one of the excitement of meeting expats and another one of tension between those who want to express their political affiliations and those who, like me, refrain from sharing a single opinionated word for fear of any kind of repercussion (It's an instinct you develop when life has been anything but peace).
Unlike others, I got lucky enough to queue behind a 50-year-old man who didn't care to gossip about my vote intentions. He just wanted to know about my private life. Trust me when I say that, in a country where emotions occupy such a space in politics, being questioned about your life is not a big deal.
I never asked him what the key was to be successful abroad, for him to have the authority to tell me that in foreign lands, one has to eat shit before one can succeed. Did I reveal too much when I said I just wanted to make a living? What had he seen in me? Was I too eager for success? As usual, there you have a repertoire of questions I didn't dare to ask, yet I carried them with me for a couple of years.
The subsequent analysis of his life, which I never asked for but he shared anyway, helped me understand the underlying reasoning behind eating shit abroad to succeed abroad. In his fifties, he was married to a British woman and was the father of two or more children -I can't remember the exact number-. Settled in Britain for more than ten years.
Was that for him to be successful? Probably yes.
Did that mean he no longer ate shit? Most likely not.
No matter the bank account he has, or the hero he is as a father and as a husband - a man who is in his fifties, eats as much shit as one who is in his twenties. For that to be true, they need to be abroad, and you will see how the portions served on both dishes can be the same. What I do acknowledge in his favour: there was a certain tone in his voice reflecting how expert he'd become in mastering the art of finding taste in the shit you eat, something my premature twenties didn't have.
At what moment did life turn him into a master? What happened to him that made him look so calm in the middle of a storm his eyes were screaming? Someone like him, who could not see his parents back home getting older. Someone who missed the family drama and the get-togethers on New Year's Eve. The songs you used to sing along with your cousins and neighbours throughout December.
Someone like him, who couldn't see his siblings and cousins growing up, celebrating their major achievements and crying their losses out. Someone like him couldn't see what his best friends from home were up to in life. Someone like him did not understand the pain of his ill mother because he couldn't be there, in person, to see it, to live it. And accepting that the only thing his mother would share with him was that she was fine. He was gone from all of it. A lot of chances to have memories with his home country were lost because he was gone. What soul is left for the ones who left? What soul can be fully in Britain, with a wife and two children, when half of it had dissolved in the Atlantic Ocean?
No one forced him to lose what he lost. No one awarded him the things that he won. If he never went abroad, he would never have felt alone. His soul would have been full. But his soul could have never been alive. It turns out that what made his soul alive was the shit, the one he eats when the foreign loneliness knocks the door. When half of his soul is with the life he lost, and the other half with the one he won.
He clearly chose to feel alive. Some others choose to never win and never lose. I think I know what my decision is; maybe I've known it since the moment I read what his eyes were saying and what his words were hiding.
Copyright © 2023-2024 Haroldmosquera.co.uk. All rights reserved.