Every immigrant knows this call. You perform ‘fine’ for the people who love you most. This post is about what happens when you finally stop performing.
You know the call I’m talking about. The phone call home every immigrant makes on a Sunday evening. The one you learn to perform for.
It’s Sunday evening. You’re sitting on the edge of your bed in your apartment — the one that still doesn’t feel fully like yours yet, because the walls are bare and the couch belongs to someone you’re subletting from and the heating makes a sound at 2am that you’ve never been able to identify.
Your phone rings. It’s your mother. Or your father. Or your grandmother who never quite figured out WhatsApp but figured it out for you.
You take a breath. You straighten up slightly. And then you answer.
You look out the window at the grey February sky as you say it.
You are performing fine. And you are so good at it that your mother hangs up the phone and tells her friends that her child is thriving in Canada.
The Performance We All Learn
Every immigrant learns this performance in their first few months, and nobody teaches it. You pick it up because you love the people back home and you do not want them to worry. Because they sacrificed for you to be here. Because your father worked extra shifts to help with your flight ticket, and you cannot tell him that some days Canada is asking more of you than you have.
So you perform fine. And you get very, very good at it.
You learn which details to share and which to edit. You learn to say “my manager is challenging” instead of “I cried in the bathroom at work on Thursday.” You learn to say “the rent is a bit high but I’m managing” instead of the actual number, which would give your mother a heart attack. You learn to say “I miss home sometimes” in a light, casual tone that signals homesickness as a small, manageable feeling rather than the particular 3am grief it actually is.
You learn to be fine. Even when you are not.
What 3am Actually Feels Like
Let me tell you what nobody posts on social media.
There is a specific loneliness in immigration that is not about being physically alone. You can be surrounded by people, busy with work, building a real life here, and still feel somewhere underneath it all that something is missing. The word I kept reaching for is untethered. I wrote a whole post about why newcomers feel alone in Canada even when everything is going right, and this is its quieter cousin.
Back home, you were held in place by a thousand small things you never had to think about. The way your street sounded in the morning. The friends who could finish your sentences because they had known you for twenty years. The family that just showed up without needing an invitation. Most of that is on the other side of an ocean now. WhatsApp carries the voice. It does not carry the weight.
My version of that feeling came on a Saturday morning, almost a decade ago. 7:30am. A bowl of cereal, a Chelsea match on TV — kick-off at half past seven in Canada because back home that same game starts at one in the afternoon, and the time difference is not just a number, it is a feeling. Back home I had never once watched Chelsea alone. There was always someone — family, friends, usually both, always noise and banter and the particular joy of sharing a result with people who care about the result. But that morning it was just me, the cereal, and Peter Drury’s voice filling a quiet apartment.
Chelsea won. I had nobody to tell.
I still remember it clearly. That is how quietly those moments land.
In Canada, you are good at your job. You are polite to your neighbours. You are building something real. But there are evenings when you sit with your meal in a quiet apartment and feel, briefly but genuinely, like a guest in a life that belongs to someone else.
That is not failure. That is the cost of leaving somewhere. And it is worth naming out loud, because most immigrants carry it without ever saying it.
The Turning Point
I want to tell you about one phone call that changed something for me.
It was about eight months after I arrived. A Sunday. The usual ritual. My mother asked how I was doing, and I opened my mouth to perform fine, and instead I told her the truth. Not the catastrophic version. Just the truth. I was tired. The winter was long. I had been dealing with something health-related that I had been hiding from her. I missed home. I was okay — genuinely okay, not performing okay — but it had been a hard week and I needed to say so.
My mother was quiet for a moment. Then she said something I have carried with me since:
That line broke the performance open. A mother asking not for reassurance but for the truth, so she could take it to God on my behalf. I did not know how to keep performing after that.
She had been performing back too — performing proud, performing certain, performing okay with the distance so that I would not carry the guilt of it. Mothers always know. Mine had simply decided that day to stop playing along.
We talked properly for the first time in months. Actual things. The tiredness. The weather. The health situation I had been hiding. Nothing spectacular happened on that call. But it was the first real conversation we had had since I left, and something loosened in my chest afterwards that had been tight for a long time.
What I Want to Say to You
If you are a newcomer reading this at some hour when it is quiet and the performance is off and you are just you — I want you to know something.
The hard parts are not a sign that you made the wrong choice. They come with the choice. Every person who has built a life somewhere new has paid some version of this. The first 72 hours are the practical cost. The phone call home is the emotional one.
You are not weak for feeling any of it. And you are not obligated to hide it from the people who love you.
The people back home are not fragile. They carried hard things long before you left. They would rather carry a hard week with you than be left outside the glass, watching a performance they already half-know is a performance.
Let them in a little. Not all the way if you are not ready. Just enough to be real.
Call home this week. Tell them something true.
— J. Alabi, LandedAndLiving.ca 🍁
