Why the Hardest Part of a Journey Is Rarely the Travel Itself
Launch library · evergreen read
When migration stories are told in full detail, the physical act of travelling, boarding a plane or a ship, tends to feature relatively briefly in the overall account. This is compared to everything surrounding it, the decision to leave, the paperwork, the arrival, and the long, uncertain settling in period that followed afterwards.
This imbalance suggests that the popular image of migration as a single dramatic journey misses most of what actually made the experience genuinely difficult for the people living through it. It focuses on the shortest and often least eventful part while underplaying the much longer periods of real hardship either side of it.
A more accurate account usually spends far more time on these surrounding periods instead of the travel itself, treating it merely as a brief hinge. It becomes the connector between two much longer, more difficult, more significant phases of the overall migration experience for the family.