Two Hours Ahead: Life As A Border Commuter
Every day, I crossed a border. Not just the one marked by signs, gates, and checkpoints, but the one I carried inside me. I lived in two worlds, and sometimes I felt like I didn’t belong. I was a border commuter, but my hardest commute didn’t happen in my car, stuck in a two-hour line, or walking up the bridge under extreme weather conditions. Because on one side, I was a local, but on the other side, I was an outsider. In one language, I was fluent; in the other, I was never sure. And every time I crossed this border --whether it was in a car, on foot, or in my mind-- I was forced to ask myself: Who am I? And where do I belong?
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The first episode talks about how I decided to become a border commuter, and essentially how the first years of my journey went, along with several snippets of the moment fellow commuters also made the decision. The name of this episode is supposed to serve as an irony because I am basically describing a long and complex process while still calling it “a dream”. -
In this episode, I cover the psychological and physical effects that crossing the border entails. I spent most of my years as a border commuter walking to cross the bridge so I wanted to talk about this specific matter addressing it while talking about how the same aspect of walking involved not being able to stay and get involved in the community because of the temporality of my status and the psychological effects this can have on a border commuter.
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With Always Extra, I wanted to create awareness about the levels of heightened stress that the overall effort of border commuters entail and I develop this context with the scenarios of how the extra paperwork and legal processes generate high levels of anxiety, how my temporality caused several potential relationships to fail because I would give “extra” effort and end up exhausting myself in the process, and lastly, the extra strength needed when doubts about self-identity present themselves through stranger’s or close ones’ questioning.
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This episode follows the COVID-19 Pandemic years, the migrant crisis peak after, and my Bachelor’s graduation; the overall theme is how being a “part-time” border commuter limits a lot of your opportunities and how this affects your mental health leaving you with the constant feeling that you are alone and your situation is hard to understand as it requires extra components or extra patience. I also included the dilemma about doing “the right thing”, since failure is one of the biggest risks for border commuters; if a border commuter fails, their status would be endangered and this carries big legal issues.
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Overthinking is very self-explanatory. I talk about the mental toll that the limited resources and the constant hunt for opportunities has on the population; topics such as planning of the future and professional development depend on permit duration and the status border commuters are under, effort does not matter, hence the development of an overthinking mindset to stay on top of the processes needed to be able to take advantage of the benefits offered. I also talk about the effects that vehicles have on border commuters.
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The last episode talks about the otherness that is created by the temporality implicated in the status and how this stays even after graduation. I also cover how the expiration of my working status forced me to seek another level of degree and this, ultimately opened the door to make this project possible and the importance of creating safe spaces in academia.
