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.
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.
“Hello Mummy. I’m fine. Yes, everything is going well. The job is good. The weather is — yes, it’s cold but I have a coat. I’m eating well. I’m not tired. I’m happy. Everything is fine.”
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
There is a particular skill that immigrants develop — usually within the first three months — that nobody teaches you and nobody names. I call it the fine performance.
You learn it because you love the people back home. Because you do not want them to worry. Because they sacrificed too much for you to arrive here and struggle. Because your aunt who doubted you is watching. Because your father worked extra shifts to help with your flight ticket and you will not, cannot, tell him that some days Canada feels like it 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 that comes with immigration that is unlike any other kind of loneliness. It is not the loneliness of being alone in a room. It is the loneliness of being in a new country, surrounded by people, busy with the machinery of building a new life — and still feeling, somewhere underneath all of it, untethered.
The tether was the familiar. The smell of your mother’s cooking. The sound of your street at morning. The shorthand you have with childhood friends — twenty years of shared reference, compressed into a look, a phrase, a joke that needs no explanation. All of that is on the other side of an ocean now. And WhatsApp calls, bless them, carry the voice but not the weight.
You grieve things you did not expect to grieve. The ability to show up when something happens back home. The texture of belonging somewhere without effort. The ease of being completely known.
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 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.
This is not failure. This is immigration. It is the cost of the thing, and it is real, and it deserves to be said out loud.
The Turning Point
I want to tell you about a phone call that changed something for me.
It was about eight months after I arrived. I called home on a Sunday — the usual ritual — and my mother asked how I was doing, and I opened my mouth to perform fine, and instead I said:
“Honestly? It’s been a hard week, Mummy.”
Silence. Then: “Tell me.”
And I did. Not the catastrophic version. Not the performance. Just the truth: I was tired. The winter was long. I had a difficult situation with my health. I missed home. I was okay — genuinely okay, not performing okay — but it had been a hard week and I needed to say it.
My mother was quiet for a moment. Then she said something I have carried with me since:
“I didn’t need you to be fine. I needed to know you were real.”
She knew I had been performing. Mothers always know. She had been performing back too — performing proud, performing certain, performing okay with the distance so that I wouldn’t feel the guilt of it.
Two people who love each other, performing fine for each other, across an ocean.
We laughed about it. Then we actually talked.
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 of this journey are not a sign that you made the wrong choice. They are the cost of the right one. Every person who has ever built a life somewhere new has paid some version of this cost. The loneliness. The performing fine. The 3am untethered feeling. The Chelsea match you win alone.
You are not alone in it. You are not weak for feeling it. And you are not obligated to hide it — not from yourself, and not from the people who love you.
Call home. And when they ask how you are, try something small and true. You don’t have to tell them everything. But give them something real. They can handle it. They are stronger than your performance of fine gives them credit for. And so are you.
The people back home are not fragile. They carried hard things long before you left. They can carry the truth of a hard week — and they would rather carry it with you than be left outside the glass, watching a performance they already know is a performance.
Let them in. Not all the way, if you’re not ready. Just a crack. Just enough to be real.
That is where the actual connection lives. Not in the performance. In the crack.
Call home this week. Tell them something true.
— J. Alabi | LandedAndLiving.ca
