I can hardly believe it, but it's getting close to the 5th anniversary of my move to the Netherlands. It's less than a month away. Incidentally, that also means that I could in fact, according to the current law, apply to be a Dutch citizen as soon as that happens, if I wanted to.

But you know what? I don't think I want to. Foremostly, because the Dutch don't support dual citizenship. So I would have to give up and revoke my Hungarian nationality - and become full on Dutch.

And, yeah, I guess I am simply not prepared to be 100% Dutch.*

Or rather, I am not prepared to cease being Hungarian.

I am not even sure what that would mean, but what I *am* sure of is that I am not prepared to cease speaking Hungarian. I am pretty sure these things aren't equivalent, but they aren't independent notions either. I'm not sure if it's possible to disconnect your native language from your nationality. I don't want to go into political and philosophical debates about this, so let's just stick to the fact that Hungarian is indeed my supposed native language. 

And what is Hungarian anyway? It's this (allegedly) weird language spoken mostly by 10 million (weird?) people in the middle of the Carpathian Basin, surrounded by all kinds of other languages and people which have nothing to do with Hungarian at all. There is kind of this system linguistically across Europe, where all major language families have their little corner, Latins in South-West, Germanics up North, Slavics in the East - and then there is us in the midst of all this. We are literally the odd ones out, an island of 'not-understandableness'. And yes, I know I know, you can find other odd ones out on the map too, but it does seem like we are the only *landlocked* odd one out country - so unlike Albanians or Latvians, we can't just say "f*** these weird neighbours" and sail out onto the sea. 

Btw I love how I managed to find a map on which we are categorized simply as 'Non-Indo European' (but we are Finno-Ugric in case you were wondering).

Anyway, so I explained all of this because I feel like this contributes to the sense of belonging (or lack thereof) that I feel living as an expat. Hungary is this little island floating in Eastern/Central-Europe, and for a Hungarian to leave Hungary is in linguistic terms like jumping off the 'island of familiarity' into the 'sea of the unknown'. Which is super fun, you swim around, you get on a boat and you paddle paddle paddle, and you see and hear a lot of new things, yadda yadda yadda. But after a while paddling is kind of exhausting, and you kind of want to just reach the shore and put your feet down on the ground again and not have to paddle. EVER again. Or at least for a little bit.

To illustrate this sneaky constant effort of 'paddling', I have this recurring example from my everyday life: when I'm really tired, I blurt things out in Hungarian. Involuntarily. The couple first times it happened to me it was quite scary actually, now I'm a bit more used to the phenomenon but it still freaks me out that my brain has a 'power saving mode.' Because that's my best explanation, that my brain just falls back on less consuming tasks when there's sugar shortage, in this case, speaking Hungarian obviously seems to win over English. Despite the fact that I've been speaking English in the past 5 years pretty much day and night. It's just so different from my hard-wired native language that it doesn't seem to be able to overwrite it.

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Disclaimer: all of the above might be total utter nonsense, and there might be other explanations for all the things I'm feeling or saying. Maybe no other Hungarian feels this way EVER, or maybe any expat feels like this every now and then and this has nothing to do with being Hungarian. Quite possible. I don't know. I am just thinking out loud, coming up with my own theories to explain the world around me.

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