I got a work visa but lost my mind
I will be the first to say that life has been extremely kind to me in the past year. I have an interesting job that allows me to travel to new places, my health, a great support system, and no drama. I made some new friends and lost fifteen pounds by looking after myself better.
However, there was one thing that lurked unpleasantly in the background of the entire year for me: the process of getting a work visa. As the title of this essay suggests, I got a work visa but (at times) felt like I had completely lost my mind. I experienced a series of negative feelings — anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, guilt. On bad days, the weight of these feelings were crushing.
In the past few months, I have gone back and forth on whether to publicly talk about this or not, and if so, how to tell my story. I think I come across as a very candid person, but I am actually very private about things that really bother me. Additionally, the past two years have gotten me to question (among many things) why other people write, why I write, and how important it is to me that other people like what I write. Ultimately, for personal and practical reasons, I decided to keep a low profile throughout the process, and then only share when it was over.
It is over now.
I feel like this is obvious, but I’ll be clear: this post is not intended as legal advice, as a commentary on immigration and visa policies, or as a representation of how other people going through similar processes also feel. This is just an articulation of my mind over the past year.
Without going into details, the TL;DR of my situation was that being able to stay in the country beyond a specific date was contingent on the approval of my visa application. This sounds straightforward, but there were several additional elements that made the situation more complex for me:
I was extremely, extremely invested in being able to stay: while it is obviously not as dramatic as a matter of life-and-death, at no point did I allow myself to accept that it would be fine if I could no longer live in the country.
Due to my own circumstances, I was eligible for a very niche visa that never gets mentioned in the media; it is similar to, but ultimately not identical to the visa most other foreign employees apply for.
We are (or, if you’re cynical about it, the news has a way of making us feel like we are) living in different times today, and I did not know what to expect during the specific process of my application during this time; there was an element of uncertainty.
The aforementioned element of uncertainty was magnified by the fact that my office had zero experience or prior familiarity with this visa. Every step of the process was new to us and the immigration attorney the office hired was our only to-date, living source of knowledge and wisdom. Without going into details, our endeavor to get me a work visa hit a number of bumps and went through some unnecessary detours before it was ultimately approved.
Now that all this is behind me (for now), I want to be direct and honest about the ways in which applying for a work visa — which in theory is just an administrative process — affected my emotions and psyche. It would be inaccurate to say that I was upset all the time or every single day, but I struggled with a lot of overwhelming, negative feelings that were directly related to my visa situation. Through extensive journaling and unpacking my feelings over the year, I have determined that my work visa application process led to six distinct thought processes, which in turn influenced my emotional health.
I will be the first person to acknowledge that I personally do, in reality, have other options of where to live. As a result, I will also be the first person to admit that my decision to file a work visa application is a choice, and thus, by extension, I have chosen the consequences that come with it: uncertainty, having to deal with bureaucracy, etc. (No comment on other people’s decisions to file for visas.) The purpose of this essay is not to blame anyone for my feelings. They are just, literally, my feelings.
1) For better or for worse, I was aware throughout the year that life as I knew it could be over at the end of the year if my work visa application was not approved. The possibility of that loss was really frightening given my emotions on what this country means to me and my thoughts on having to move back home (that is a personal story for another day, maybe). You know that cliched question of what you would do if you only had one year to live? At times, I felt like I was really living that question.
People sometimes answer that cliched question by saying that they would drop everything unimportant and just focus on what really makes them happy, what really matters. I would have probably answered something along those lines a year ago. I have since come to the conclusion that, if applied in real life, this approach can lead to unhappiness.
Putting my possible departure at the forefront of my mind led to panic and unreasonably high expectations. At the end of some days, I thought, oh my god, oh my god, another day is gone, I’m one day closer to all this being over, and felt incredibly sad.
I also put a lot of pressure on myself to soak up every moment and be happy, because I should enjoy it when I can. Instead, I beat myself up at the end of days when I had felt lazy or if I had been in a bad mood. And, no shit, this caused a loop of negative emotions.
I wondered how differently I would have approached my days if I was completely free of obligations — that is, if I didn’t have to go to work. I don’t think things would have been better: if I was already beating myself up for the way I spent several hours of downtime a day, it would probably be even worse if I was able to hold myself completely, wholly accountable for the way every second was spent.
I also wondered if my feelings would have been different in a situation where I knew things might end, but didn’t know when things might end — unlike in this case, where my departure date was very clear in the event of a visa denial. But then again, knowing things could end but not knowing when is basically life, summed up.
2) I vacillated between being hyper-aware of the time I might have left in the country (see point #1) and trying to just live in the moment, doing what I could to not remind myself or others that I could be gone in several months. I felt like constantly reminding everyone about my possible departure would not be constructive in building sincere, authentic relationships, so I tried not to bring it up.
Sometimes, when I meet up with friends who live back at home or in other places, the hangout ends in a slightly awkward “how long are you here for?” exchange in which both sides (sincerely or insincerely) express a commitment to meet up again before I leave. I think we are/I am sometimes uncomfortable with the sense of finality in two people no longer being in the same place, uncomfortable with the impending loss of the option to meet up again for the immediate future, so we kid ourselves/I kid myself into thinking that we/I want to see the other person more than we/I really want to. (Or is it just me?) I was eager to avoid this scenario in the context of my visa situation.
My attempts to forget about this whole visa business and pretend my life was unaffected by it were not always effective. I was reminded of the realities of my situation during seemingly insignificant moments that caught me off-guard. For example, when my new friends invited me to concerts, 5k races, and other events, my first question was, when is it? I could not commit to them if they were scheduled after a certain date. (I mean, I could just pay first and worry about it later, but I am cheap.) These small moments sometimes made me feel sad, even though I tried to shrug it off around others through humor.
3) I felt very lonely throughout this process because I did not know anybody going through the exact same niche work visa application. I do not hold my friends responsible for this, because I clearly had agency in how much to share with them and chose to share very little. I kept the discussion of details almost solely between myself, the immigration lawyer, and anybody else who had to know.
When friends asked me how my work visa application was going, I usually just said it was going fine and it would definitely work out in the end, and left it at that. There were a number of reasons why I did not go into further detail:
I felt like I didn’t want to additionally burden my friends, the vast majority of whom are also recent college graduates just trying to figure out life in our early twenties.
My immediate, specific worries or frustrations usually surrounded very specific paperwork or actions. I didn’t feel like having to explain the situation to someone else, and especially not during times when certain things had just happened and I still didn’t have a handle on the full picture myself in the moment. And let’s face it, complaining about a boy is far more universally relatable than complaining about filing form DS-160.
Truthfully, given how heavily my negative feelings rested on one specific thing that was beyond their control, there was not much my friends could have done or said that would make me feel better. I was not always interested in well-meaning words of support if they were not rooted in concrete evidence. (Sorry.)
So I felt lonely, and then I blamed myself for feeling lonely; another loop of negative feelings.
To be honest, even looking back now, I’m not sure I would have done things differently here. I rarely felt better after talking about it, and decided this was one of those things I would just have to ride out until it was over.
4) The idea that this entire visa application process required having a set of papers and a number of documents got to me much more than I expected it to. I became paranoid about my things being lost or stolen. I generally have faith in the average person’s level of decency, I really do. However, the possibility of ever having my passport or the other dozen or so papers international students and foreigners have (that might be needed at any point during the visa application) stolen — as well as what that would mean for me logistically — weighed on me in moments that seemed inconsequential to most people:
You are on a plane and need to go to the bathroom. Do you just leave your things in your bag that’s under your seat?
You are staying at a hotel during a trip. You have agreed to meet up with a friend who lives in that city for dinner. You want to take a small purse containing your phone, cards, and some money to dinner because (a) you’re sick of lugging your backpack everywhere you go, and (b) the small purse just matches your outfit/the vibe a lot better. Your documents will not fit into the small purse. What do you do? Would your answer depend on which city you’re in? Would your answer depend on how long dinner is supposed to last?
You are on a road trip with a friend. You pass a place — maybe a state park, a museum, a coffee shop — that looks really cool and you decide to check it out. You have no idea exactly how long you’ll be away from the car: maybe thirty minutes, maybe closer to two hours. You have no idea how safe the area is. Do you take your backpack (and all your documents) with you?
I know that the statistical odds of being robbed or mugged — or more specifically, of having my documents stolen — are generally low. However, I heard several horror stories of friends’ visa application processes (for slightly different visas) being affected as a result of things that were not their fault: the immigration attorney who moved offices and misplaced a file in the process, the college mail room that lost a particular envelope from the government containing a student’s vital documents. I became obsessed about making sure that I could not allow myself to fuck up whatever (in the context of this case) was within my control. I was hyperaware of the time, energy, and money that other people had already sunk into my case (more on that in point #6), and didn’t want to cause any more work for anyone as a result of losing stuff.
This paranoia grew as I got closer and closer to the crucial decision date, as I accumulated more and more possibly useful paperwork on hand. With no way to prove that I would, with absolute certainty, never lose my documents, I kept worrying. The worry was mostly low-key, but it was perpetual; I felt that I couldn’t ever take a break from thinking about it. As the worry lingered and worsened over the months, it slowly ate away at me. Sometimes, I cried quietly to myself and thought, I am so exhausted from having to worry about this.
5) The debate over how stringent visa application and immigration processes should be frequently turns into a debate on where to draw the line between foreigners who "deserve” to stay and foreigners who don’t. Upon learning about my situation, very well-meaning friends and acquaintances from all ends of the political spectrum usually said something along the lines of well, you’re well-educated and intelligent and contributing to society and you deserve to be here because the country is better with you in it.
The implications of the word deserve in the context of my case fucked with me. Let’s be honest: there are countless other young foreign students and professionals who are more qualified, smarter, more industrious etc. than I am who were not given the opportunity to apply for a work visa. This is not meant as a self-deprecating statement, but rather just an acknowledgment that I am mostly here because I was in the right place at the right time, because of a combination of privileges.
At times, I was wracked with guilt for having this opportunity. I was extremely conscious of the many big and little things that just happened to work in my favor and how so many things could have gone wrong along the way. I don’t deserve this, I thought as my heart ached for specific individuals, as well as the abstract concept of people who wanted to stay but were unable to. I’m just a random, average nobody.
At other times, I gave myself additional pressure to excel, to stand out, because you have to show them that you deserve to be here. I gave myself this pressure before my visa application was approved, and now, I still sometimes give myself pressure to justify my presence. The pressure isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s there.
I tried/try, but it was/is hard for me to always separate my self-worth from my ability to stay in the country.
Sometimes, people like to say some variation of I find that the harder I work, the luckier I get. Multiple people used this line in conversations with me.
I understood the intention behind this sentiment, but I took very little solace in this because:
This once again takes us back to the question of to what extent I am here because of my own efforts. This is a thought process that leads to shitty feelings either way (see above flowchart).
I am not hardworking and don’t particularly like working hard — at least, not by other people’s standards.
6) I would not be here today without the emotional, financial, and logistical support from many individuals who made it possible for me to get a work visa. I never forget this.
As I dealt with the negative feelings that were linked to applying for a work visa (points #1-5), I felt like it would be horrible to outwardly express these negative feelings because:
I knew how ridiculously lucky I was to even be in a situation where I had people who were so willing and able to take a chance on me, and I didn’t want to ever give these people any negative impressions of me by sounding ungrateful
I didn’t want to complain because I thought it would make other people with fewer privileges feel bad
So I kept a lot of my emotions bottled up.
It is worth unpacking why I felt/feel like I wasn’t/am not entitled to express my emotions. Admittedly, this is still a work in progress.
It has been a month since my work visa got approved. It has taken me a lot of time and soul-searching to allow myself to feel emotions, and then to name them.
Surprisingly, my negative feelings peaked in the one or two weeks after the approval of my visa. I think that my brain had gotten so used to ruminating over these thoughts, over and over again; after my visa was approved, my brain was like, What’s next? What should I do with all this nervous energy now?
This feels like the first time in my life where I don’t have a singular, immediate, tangible, time-specific, you either make it or you don’t hurdle in front of me. Getting into high school, getting into college, getting an internship, passing a midterm, getting a job, graduating from college, getting a work visa — that is all behind me for the immediate future. In the absence of something specific in my own life to worry about, I began thinking about bigger and more abstract things in the world and felt really sad and hopeless. I then berated myself for not thinking about these things sooner, for having been so selfish to mostly only think about me for a year.
It took a few really low moments and the patience of loved ones to begin feeling better. I still experience emotions related to points #1-6 frequently, but being able to write about them here in exactly the way I want to and being able to go into a lot of detail about why I felt the way I felt has been very good for me. It’s not all flowers and rainbows from here: the future is still uncertain, and I might one day have to repeat this process all over again (albeit with more familiarity and knowledge, which will definitely help). But here you go: this is the story of my past year, and I’m beginning to allow myself to feel excited about the next.