How social media and literary fiction gave me back my country

I left my country of birth, Italy, in 2005, when I was 21 years old. I left it for many reasons; I felt the need to find myself far from my family, I was curious about living abroad, like my parents and sisters did before me. For various years I avoided all contact with Italians abroad. I was afraid of becoming too much of that kind of immigrants who only speak their mother tongue, always eat their country’s food, who don’t learn the language of the country that hosts them. I was afraid of living in a bubble basically, a place different from home only in the landscape. 

My mom, a Dutch woman who moved to Italy in her twenties to study and ended up staying and bringing up her children there, often told me that after decades abroad, she felt neither Dutch nor Italian, and that she was ending up seeing mainly the negative sides of both. I never felt 100% Italian (I even had a minor identity crisis during my teenage years) in the first place, so I doubt that will be my experience. In general I consider my life abroad a positive experience and never felt homesick.

However, something changed last year. After 15 years abroad, I started connecting with Italy again. It all began with a friendship with an inspiring Italian woman, it continued with me starting writing fiction in Italian and following online creative writing courses in an Italian school, and my relationship with my home country is now flourishing thanks to social media and online conversations. I am listening and talking to Italians via social media almost on a daily basis now. I learned how to get the best out of social media, what I assume it was its original intent, to connect people. For sure not actually living in Italy allows me to cherry-pick what I like the most about it, but it also led me to (re)create an emotional connection with my country.