So it’s been two months – as olah chadasha, as Israeli, as new life.
It’s pretty crazy that I moved out of my parents’ house and moved to a new country all in one breath. And it’s also pretty crazy that at twenty-two I am able to begin fulfilling an enormous dream, a life-project. There’s a lot going on and I just left school, the first period of my life where nothing is planned ahead for me. I could do ANYTHING right now. And I’m here, sitting at a computer in Jerusalem just discussing what is going on here, now. Post-first stages of aliyah.
And for someone who is in the process of fulfilling a life-dream, I am so very very lost. I have no direction. I took a plane east and I stopped, dead halt. The direction was east and now it’s at a standstill, four arrows pointed inward, towards my heart, beating on a daily basis in Jerusalem.
And it’s going to take time to figure it out, I have accepted that. And it all doesn’t happen so fast. And I’m not the only one. I’m not, honest. And you can’t replace your closest friends inside of two months. And you can’t ever replace your best memories, you can only make new ones. Friends and memories. And family. And you can’t have a new mother tongue. You can’t overcome your challenges in a day. You can’t accomplish life-dreams at the end of a ten-hour flight.
I wish all the people I love would come here and make aliyah too. I wish people had the same dream as me and lots of others who came here. But it is really hard. I’m not going to fool anyone or trick them into it. There is smooth aliyah, there is positive aliyah. There’s no such thing as an easy aliyah. Not if you’re doing it from scratch.
So I’m off to go figure it out. I don’t want it to be that my dream climaxed when I landed in Ben-Gurion. I think the dream has to have only just begun. My missions are not all clear right now. I thought they were, but I have a lot to discover. It’s totally fine. It’s the way it is for new olim. We push through. We force our way in. Otherwise, we end up back where we were born, wondering what went wrong. But I am going to figure it out, mistakes along the way despite the planning. This is a life-dream, and they don’t get fulfilled everyday. Or in a day. Not even two months.
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