A former stalker of mine once spent several months in Japan and found how she was treated so unbearably that she fled back home in a state of depression and sought medication. Since returning there, she seems to have forgotten how she felt about being treated like a purple multi-tentacled alien and seems to jump on a soap box every time someone who actually lives here has a complaint about something. She's great at telling us how we should feel as she speaks from the comfort of her native country. She's also not alone. There are a great many people who don't live here and who are "experts" on how I "should" react about things they personally don't have to put up with. You can't know what it's like to inhabit this reality unless you, too, have truly and deeply lived it for the duration. There's a vast difference between how you feel about your first trip to immigration and your 5th, 10th, or 20th and being gawked at a few times and putting up with it everyday for years on end.
I won't miss the peanut gallery who tell me how I "should" feel about life here when they have limited, little or no experience with the workaday reality.
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