By Dina-Perla Portnaar

What you don’t want to hear is that the first building block of my new life in Paphos became one of the most exhausting experiences of my life. Happy narratives may be preferred when somebody joins your world, in my case from Amsterdam. The Insta perfect photographs of places overlooking the Mediterranean, or reassurance that leaving one country for another is an elegant act of reinvention, which of course it is, have a large appeal, but there is more to it.

It’s destabilising. While buying a house remotely, I had a dramatic collapse and erosion of certainty. Parts of that process will be impossible to forgive for many years to come. Some parts are unheard of in the Netherlands. Other parts have turned out better. Because there’s something special when women work together toward the same goal, which solved a lot. I’m now heading in the right direction.

The purchase confronted me with how much I understood the rules in Amsterdam – simple and no-nonsense – and with the social privilege I had. I wouldn’t have to ‘prove’ my integrity and wouldn’t have trouble with selecting people for services. Now, the unconscious competence and familiarity need strengthening while I broaden my network here. Luckily it exists, so I’m not starting from scratch, but it’s still not where I need it to be.

What you do want to hear is how Cyprus is a blessing. There’s a softness in daily interactions that northern Europe has, in many ways, lost. Mostly, I’m here to improve my health, and vitality. The rest is about space, authenticity, and distance from the increasingly accelerated problems in the Netherlands. Amsterdam shaped me intellectually and professionally. Yet it also trained my nervous system, while the clash of norms and values became unbearable.

Cypriot philosopher Nektarios Savvides wrote that identity emerges most visibly inside liminal spaces. Those unstable psychological territories where a person no longer fully belongs to what came before, but hasn’t yet integrated into what comes next. Mentally and physically, that’s what I’ve been going through. At night, staring at ceilings while my instincts could barely tolerate the legal procedures of my purchase, initially without openness, I realised migration is existential. Because it rearranges a person’s relationship with certainty itself.

For two decades, certainty has also meant working internationally in media, public relations, marketing, and communications. Moreover, I studied moresprudence, moral dilemmas or grey areas, which can be discovered through moral deliberations. I’ll always be an opinion maker and author.

Cyprus exists in a permanent dialogue between worlds. Europe and the Middle East intersect here culturally, historically, and psychologically. Cyprus often feels simultaneously peaceful and unsettled. That tension gives it intellectual texture. It makes me think of the Cypriot thinker Chrysoula Vasilou and her interpretation of topos, the philosophical idea of place.

For Vasilou, it becomes meaningful through memory, participation, and emotional recognition. In that sense, belonging in such a texture cannot be purchased. A person may buy a house but remain psychologically homeless. Little material possession can lead to feeling anchored. Modern migration culture speaks little about this contradiction.

Relocation has become aestheticised. Entire industries now market fantasies as social media transformed migration into visual lifestyle branding. That’s not why I’m here. The deeper questions remain unresolved, including what it means to belong. I don’t yet fully understand why Paphos, but my inner call to move here has been loud and clear, so finally I answered. I’m here to belong within tension.  

I haven’t mastered Greek yet. I’m open to moments of misunderstanding, adjustment and observation. That vulnerability is precisely the point. German philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner argued that human beings are fundamentally artificial creatures who construct routines, systems, and social structures to protect themselves from existential instability. Moving here removes protections.

Dina’s fortnightly column will cover her time spent learning to live with the island