Immigration, pandemic, and trauma: a hard trio to work with

The pandemic brings a whole new level of anxiety, grief, fear, guilt, and pain to all immigrants. We’ve chosen to leave our home countries looking for new opportunities and our families are across borders we haven’t been allowed to cross for over a year now.

The trauma that comes with the immigrant experience is very real when things are “normal”, especially due to racism and xenophobia. Now, imagine this big community of world citizens also traumatized by the fact they are far from their loved ones, lost loved ones and could not be there to mourn their losses, lost jobs, lost faith, and have their lives in the hands of decision-makers of two countries: their country of residence and their homeland.

It also applies to all minorities, who are being hit much harder by everything is going on.

Honestly, privileged rich people will NEvER understand the level of fear, panic, anxiety, trauma, emotional and mental exhaustion we face everyday. I am not victimizing myself and my fellow immigrants… I am simply sharing what I’ve been going through, as well as friends from all over the world.

And citizens of countries who are dealing with the pandemic mismanagement (I.e. bribes, corruption, lies spread by the government, little to no vaccine distribution…) also have to deal with the pain of seeing their people being killed by policies that should be considered crimes, as they result in millions of deaths. Like in Brazil, where over half a million died already and it’s really far from…