Recent developments in US politics… naturalized citizens like me might be at risk…
So… anyways… it got me thinking a lot…
Like… there’s this alternate timelime where I never got to learned English… cuz the only reason I know this language is cuz I came to the US.
This language has been part of my identity since… like most of the life I remember…
So I have aunts and cousins in China that are still on an immigration backlog, and they’ve been on waitlist for like a decade, they’re probably adults now, I think, no idea if they still are considered a dependent to come with the aunts (my mother’s sisters) as they are he primary beneficiaries of the visa application, dependents are derivatives… so if they are over 21, idk if they’re still allowed to come to the US, not a lawyer…
but the again, not sure if they will ultimately even decide to come, considering… it’s a lot to move countries… I remember feeling anxious when I first got here, and also it’s not the 2010s anymore, its 2025, lots has changed, those cousins probably got used to growing up over there…
Okay I sound like I’m rambling…
but my point is, this got me thinking about myself
like… what if I was never here… like… I was there in China all this time…
Who the hell am I?
What is this weird timeline… why am I here?
Like I feel like everytime something happens in life, I’m always gonna obsess about that point in the timeline where the timeline diverges on two different timelines.
Feels so weird to say I’m “American”
It’s just a paper that can be revoked at anytime, like when constitutionalism breaks down, like… glances at the news
Borders are just arbitrary lines anyway. Nations as an idea didn’t exist until the fall of monarchy driven empires. We are all humans, we are all part of the greater human experience. I say again, borders are just arbitrary lines that don’t exist functionally in the real world and are only enforced by governments. When governments fall, do the lines even matter anymore? Should they have mattered to begin with?
It seems a bit silly to obsess over because you also didn’t choose your birth parents or what country you were born in. That is just as random as anything else in your existence. The farther you go back the more absurd it becomes. What if your great grandparents had emmigrated to Finland? Would you be Finnish? In the end, does it even matter?
I suggest living the life you are experiencing in the here and now and remember that the lines between humans mean nothing other what we decide they mean, because other than oceans dividing the western and eastern hemispheres, there are no real dividing lines in nature. Focus on the future, not the past.