The Art of Finding Comfort in Unexpected Places
Written by Alexie Lunaime (she/her) // Arts and Culture Editor
Visuals by Anya Ali-Mulzet (they/them) // Crew Illustrator
It is weaved into the most unexpected places, in every small detail, in every heartbeat. It doesn’t have a formula that can be replicated. It is alive, ever-changing.
When you are at the heart of your culture, you don’t realize what components go into it. You don’t think about the smells, the sounds, the colours that create the environment around you. You just exist in it, thrive in it. It is just there, present, vibrating around the city, the media, the conversations.
It exists in you and outside of you,
and you don’t think about it because it is yours.
Moving away from home makes you realize just how much those details matter. How much the smell of the chilaquiles your grandmother is making in the kitchen changes the way you perceive your house. How the sounds of traffic and street musicians make your commute to work so much more vibrant. How the colourful houses downtown add charm to running errands. Suddenly, the new city feels empty, gray and muffled. Even though you are submerging yourself in someone else’s culture, it doesn’t feel as warm and welcoming as your own.
You look for places that have the label of your culture. Maybe it is a Mexican restaurant, an Independence Day event in a community centre or a neighborhood. But it doesn’t feel quite right. The food tastes different. The community centre event feels off. The neighborhood is lacking that charm you crave but you haven’t figured out yet where it comes from.
You adapt. You keep moving through the motions, surviving, evolving. You put in the effort to get to know more of the new culture you are in, to get to know the city, the people, to make new traditions, new friends, new habits. You try to fill the space with the new, the different, the local things that feel so unfamiliar and unexpected.
But the longing for your own doesn’t go away. You keep missing that connection, that spice that you overlooked once. You don’t miss the big things, the flashy things.
You miss the tiny things, things you never thought about when you had them.
You miss the sound of a rooster in the distance, early in the morning. You miss the smell of the lemons and spices of the snacks you would get once you got out of school.
Until one day, you walk into Costco, and one of the aisles smells just right, like cochinita pibil is supposed to smell. You freeze but move towards it. The aisle is just a hallway, but it looks like the one you used to go to. You get a glimpse of warmth and home.
And then, you might find a Spanish conversational club at a public library with a couple people from your hometown and a bunch of people from your Mexico. They understand your references and laugh at the jokes you make in your mother tongue, and it feels so right that you come back next week, and then the week after that.
You might find a coffee shop hidden in your neighborhood that is not from your culture, but the barista is from Venezuela, and it feels like talking to a cousin, so you keep coming back every Saturday.
Culture is a curious thing. It is a patchwork quilt, made of memories, habits and collective understanding. It is the jokes, and the awful TV shows we watched as kids. It’s the way you wear or don’t wear shoes inside the house, the way that you organize your grocery shopping, the gestures you make when you are talking to somebody. It’s the shared experience of reading certain school textbooks, or the songs our mothers sing to us in the car ride. It’s going to show up in the most unthinkable of places.
Culture is what we make of it, even when there are thousands of kilometres in between home and us.