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Monday, 27 June 2016

The Elephant in the Room

I waited a while, for it all to calm down really before I decided to sit down and write my feeling about the Brexit. Not only as a British person, but as a British person living abroad.

When I moved to Spain, a little under two years ago, I didn´t think that one day there would be any kind of worry, I mean i´m European, countries in the European Union have the right of free travel within the EU. I couldn´t imagine that the UK would leave.

Up until the moment when I woke up on Friday morning and saw the angry, sad, and extatically happy posts on my Facebook wall from my friends and family back in England and Scotland, I still didn´t believe it. The first words I said to my husband when he woke up was "They´ve left" Just that. Nothing more, nothing less.

That day, while everyone in England was dealing with high emotions whether they were happy or sad or angry, venting on social media, shouting ridiculous comments in the street at each other, or quietly sitting at home watching the news unfold, I went to work. Of course everyone wanted to know how I felt, what this would mean for me, for British people in general, and also a little bit of worry and fear at what this would mean for Spain (their elections happened yesterday) and for the rest of the EU.

I felt very supported here, my Spanish family are great and they all called or texted to see if this would affect me, and how I was feeling. I felt loved because at the time I felt sad, sad that this had happened, sad for the people who voted to leave with good intentions, only to feel regret the next day when the truth about the leave campaigns lies came out.

I felt, and still feel that David Cameron did the WRONG thing by resigning, that he talked in his speech that everyone has to pull together, and we have to make the country great blah blah blah, it turned into blah blah blah when he revealed that he wouldn´t lead the country through this. David Cameron is NOT a leader. A leader leads, and supports his or her people through good times and the bad. My personal thoughts are that he threw his toys out of the pram when he didn´t get his own way.

I am also left with a feeling of being disconnected from the UK, I hope it´s a temporary feeling but right now I don´t want to go back. I had felt for a while that maybe in the future we would go to live, at least for a year in England. Right now I don´t have that feeling. I have no urge to even visit the country where I was born while the people are turning against each other in the street for fear of what is going to happen to the country.

I hope that in a few months, this will blow over and everything will go back to being normal, that the people living in the UK will remember that very annoying and persistant parase "Keep Calm and Carry On" right now it has never been so relevant.

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