As any foreigner living in Malta I am prone, occasionally, to the expletive "I fucking hate this place". Or "This is a shit hole". Or any other variations. We've all been there.
Sometimes the heat becomes all too unbearable, or the waiter at any given restaurant/bar just could not be bothered to show up to take your order leaving you to then complain about how Maltese are rude, or maybe you finally succumbed to the island claustrophobia or the summer tourist invasion (just writing this is giving me a slight panic attack).
Maybe you come from a country where things are completely different from here, where south Europe meets North Africa and nothing runs on time and everyone complains all the time about everything but the everything stays the same for eons.
This is also a boring place in winter time, because it exists for the sun and the summer so it hibernates when it starts to get colder leaving its inhabitants to slowly die of nothing to do desperation.
Whatever it is, it's sometimes so easy to just attribute all your problems to Malta/ the Maltese. It becomes a mantra.
But if you want to be serious about your life, hate is too strong a word to define how you relate to this particular corner of the globe, and so is the unhappiness that seems to come with this belief. No, you don't really hate this place, you just have a complete lack of historical perspective and utter arrogance and disregards towards the state of the world this day and age. Sometimes we forget how life is out there now and how it was.
If you are truly unhappy here there is more to this feeling than what you want to think. One is blessed with above the average salaries, we live surrounded by the bluest sea, relaxed and with basically no stress. There is no austerity here. There are no protests, no revolutions, no deaths from an oppressive tyrannical government, no systematic violence. You live in a holiday resort.
In the end you complain because you lost perspective and you’ve become shallow. Or you're confusing your own personal problems with the problems of the island; you think if you leave all will be good again.
Maybe this is not the place for you. It's not for everyone, but there are those who are happy here. You can always just leave, it's not a drama. But that's not why the complaining a lot of times blows out of proportion.
After 4 summers in this island I have come to believe that when the heat arrives you can't really hide anymore. You are vulnerable physically and so it's the same emotionally. Let the hedonism begin then. And most will over drink, over drug, over party and think that all is permitted in here, that like a Vegas this is not truly a real place of consequences, but of bubble out of reality, and that once you leave you just go back to who you were/ who you were comfortable being. All is well, it's just Malta driving you insane, forcing you into a degenerate lifestyle. You're a poor soul corrupted by circumstances and peer pressure.
I had spent many years festering in the dark, depressed and distressed, thinking Portugal was the problem and escaping it the solution to everything. The first year here showed me how wrong I was. Since then I have decided to embrace the soul piercing sun of this place and remember what my dad said to me before I took that plane: "You can run from a lot of things, but not from yourself".
It will catch up with you, the truth, whatever dark corner of the soul you choose to hide in.
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