Being an immigrant is difficult. Being an immigrant as a child is even more difficult.

I was 7-years-old when my parents moved my 3-year-old brother and me from the Philippines to the United Arab Emirates.

But at 7-years-old, I left everything and everyone I knew behind and flew to a new world. Even while we lived in the blazing deserts of the UAE, I never dreamed I would get to the United States.

For as long as I can remember, I always dreamed of coming to the US. I already knew English pretty well; I watched American cartoons, American movies and ate American fast food. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t exactly rich. To put things into perspective, I remember my childhood dream was being able to buy all of my relatives, who lived with us, a bucket of KFC.

After five years in the UAE, my parents and my newborn brother went first to the US while my brother were sent back to the Philippines to stay with our Lola (grandmother) for a year before there was enough money to move us too.

That was when I first felt the immigrant isolation. I had been gone for five years. Things had changed. My relatives were all grown up. The culture had changed. And of course I had changed, I had forgotten the deeper dialect of Tagalog and struggled to relate to all the kids at my school. Adjusting was difficult, but I managed. But as soon as I got comfortable, I had to say goodbye to everyone and everything, again.

I finally made it to the US and lived in Rhode Island. I was in sixth grade and had my first contact with “white people”. I have literally only seen one white person before coming to this country, and now they’re everywhere. I adjusted to life in Rhode Island, but a year later, I had to move, again, this time to Fresno, California.

Middle school was horrendous. If I would have to describe my version of culture shock, it’d be going to middle school. Being an immigrant, I already felt out of place but compound that with being in middle school — the worst place to being different — and the world seems like a scarier and hopeless place. I was already shy so making friends was difficult. High school was much better, but I had always felt out of place, like I simply didn’t belong.

I’ve lived in Fresno for eight years now. This is equivalent to my whole time in the Philippines, my home country. For most of my life now, I’ve moved everywhere. This is the longest I’ve stayed in one place, and simply I am stir crazy.

I have come to expect to say goodbye to everything and everyone I know, because I’ve come to expect the inevitable move. The saddest thing about being an immigrant is you really don’t belong anywhere. You can’t go back to your home country since you’ve been gone for so long and you don’t really fully belong there now either. It’s a perpetual feeling ofisolation.

Immigrants are somewhat always lost in the world and living in no man’s land. That’s the sacrifice people like us made leaving our home countries for a better life abroad. My quality of living has increased..But it is at the cost of being uprooted from my roots, my extended family that raised me.

I would love to believe that as an immigrant, I am one of the bravest people in the world. It gives me solace in the loneliest times of my life. I remind myself that though I feel I may be lost in the world, I have not lost my way.