I first realised I wasn’t wanted around the age of 9. It was having to get up at 4am to be in a monstrous queue outside an embassy by 5am in the hope of getting a visa for some foreign Western European country that did it. It sticks in your mind when you have to spend most of your summer doing this, aged 9.
The next clue I got aged 10, in Austria, when I had to stay in on the anniversary of Reichskristallnacht for fear of skinheads.
Aged 12, my class mates were talking about all the foreigners and refugees from the wars which heralded the demise of Yugoslavia, who got “free food, and free housing, and even an allowance” and got to “sit around doing nothing all day”. Our teacher pointed at me and asked, “What about Mili?” “Oh,” they said, “Mili’s not like them. Mili’s different.” It left a bitter taste.
More recently, there was Bigoted Woman. A couple of the days ago, it was Ed Balls lamenting how Labour shouldn’t have let the likes of me into this country. In some ways, two thirds of my life have been a long series of microaggressions, based on the simple fact that I was born in a different country.
What is particularly painful is watching this trend get worse, all over Europe. From the neo-fascists in my own native Bulgaria, to policing the way women from certain cultures dress in France, and the persistent barrage of immigration scare stories in the British media, Europe is lurching to the right faster than you can say “flocking Eastern Europeans”. I find it sad, frustrating, and simply unworthy of liberal, democratic Europe in the 21st century.
Maybe one day the low-level racism and xenophobia I encounter on a daily basis will drive me away from this country. Where I’ll go I don’t know. Where are human beings welcome these days?