You can live in Brussels for years and still feel like a visitor

There is a specific kind of frustration that's difficult to define.

It is not loneliness exactly, because you are not alone. 

You have colleagues, you have after-work drinks, you have a full enough calendar. But if you have my same kind of sensibility, you can see, just past the edge of your daily life, a different version of the city. 

Real neighborhoods. Real people who grew up here. Conversations that have nothing to do with your institution or your project or your contract end date.

You can see them, but you just cannot reach it.

This is how I spent my first years in Brussels. 

It felt like looking through the glass at something I wanted and not having the tools to get there. For some time - due to my ignorance - I thought the problem was Brussels. That the city was quite closed, that Belgians were a bit too reserved, that some people were just lucky.

None of that was true. The problem was that I was not equipped.

What "not equipped" actually means

In Italy - and definitely in my first years here - I was terrified of talking to strangers. 

At events, I would keep hovering at the edge of groups, waiting for someone to approach me, which of course almost never happened (especially in Italy, in Belgium it's different, exactly...). 

I could not do small talk. I did not know how to ask questions that made people want to keep talking. I did not know that the single most reliable social skill, in Brussels or anywhere, is to ask someone about themselves and then actually listen.

These are learnable things. 

I know that now because I learned them. But at the time I had no framework for understanding that social confidence is a skill, not a personality trait. I thought some people had it and I didn't. So I waited.

Meanwhile my French was miserable and my Dutch did not exist. Language in Brussels - like pretty anywhere - is access to locals. Without it, you are permanently in the position of the guest, dependent on other people's generosity, unable to go anywhere the way you *really* want to.

Moreover, there was the knowledge gap. 

Brussels - again, like many cities - has layers and it can take years to see them. Old shops in the city center that no longer exist but that people of a certain age still reference. Neighborhoods with histories that explain why certain people live where they live (for example, the avenue Louise is historically "liberal" and the avenue de Tervuren is "aristocratic"). 

There're also political dynamics that shape for example urban planning. Knowing these things signals something. It tells a Belgian that you have been paying attention. That you are not just passing through.

I had none of this. I was building it, slowly, entirely on my own.

The window that kept closing

The window to do something about it was a bit narrower than I expected.

I arrived in June 2018 as an intern. 

The first year was consumed by the internship, then by finding a permanent job, which was not easy. By July 2019 I had a job. The European elections that year gave me the first real entry point, the first thread to pull. But then work took over again and I was exhausted and deeply unhappy.

COVID arrived in March 2020 and closed whatever window had been opening.

What COVID gave me, unexpectedly, was time to think. 

I had a good salary. I had no social life anymore, which stripped away the last illusion that the bubble was actually a life for me.

In April, I started doing a calculation I had never thought about doing before: how much money would I need to spend one year in Brussels without a job?

The answer was reachable. My salary had been good enough that a gap year was possible if I was careful.

That calculation did not tell me what to do, but it removed my last excuse for not asking the real question, which was: what do I actually want?

What I wanted was to stop optimizing for safety and normality and start building something that didn't feel like a torture to me, even if it was risky - I know I had a big privilege in this sense, but the very same idea of having the chance of aiming for more made me think: "Why not actually taking advantage of... this advantage?". Not using it would have been the thing I couldn't forgive myself for.

Years of playing it safe, of following the normal path like normal people do, had led me to the wrong side, watching a city I lived in but did not belong to.

In late 2020 I told my manager I was leaving. I kept working until March 2021. I wrote about what that cost me, and what it gave me, here.

The parallel life is not your fault

I am telling you this because this story is extremely common and almost nobody says it clearly.

The parallel life, work life running on one track, social life on another, local life somewhere you have never actually been to, is the default condition for internationals in Brussels. The bubble is comfortable enough to stay in indefinitely, and nobody is going to pull you out of it. You need to take the first step.

The equipment nobody gives you

The equipment you need to get out is:

Social skills that most people assume you either have or don't. You can train them, actually. Asking questions is a technique. Making someone feel heard is a technique. Showing up to the same place repeatedly until you stop being a stranger is a technique.

Language not as a certificate or an achievement but as the thing that lets you move through Belgian life as an actually "full adult", rather than as a permanent guest with poor vocabulary.

Cultural knowledge that you absorb slowly, through attention and curiosity and time. Knowing the references. Knowing the history. Knowing enough about how this place works that a Belgian feels, talking to you, that you have actually been one of them in some past life.

None of this is fast. But none of it is luck either.

What I wish I had had, in those first years behind the glass, was someone who had already done it. Even better: someone with both perspectives, who knew what it felt like to be a foreigner here and who also understood how Belgian life actually worked. Who could have said: wait, this is how this works, here is what you are missing, here is what to do next.

That is what this newsletter is trying to be.

Language was the one piece of that equipment I could actually train fastest, once I stopped waiting to feel ready for it. If that's the piece you're missing too, that's what I help people build now, daily practice that fits into a real week, not another class you'll skip when you're exhausted. Here's how it works.