After the Visa Years

On learning freedom again after a decade of migration bureacracy

I became a permanent resident of Germany over half a year ago, and I barely told anyone.

Though this is the ‘safest’ I’ve been in a decade, bureaucratically, I haven’t been able to slow myself down to switch out of visa survival mode.

Maybe this should not be a surprise. After operating for so long from a place of precarity, it takes more than a new status to step into a new way of being—or remember an old one from a previous chapter of life.

Ausländerbehörde Berlin (Foreigners Office), March 24, 2025. If I don’t look elated, it’s because I haven’t shed the shell of habitual precarity.

---

The “Visa Years”

Permanent residency means:

• No more visa applications

• No more one-to-three-year stretches of tolerated belonging

• No more wondering if I earned enough, or held the right title, to justify my continued existence here

• No more submitting myself to the whims of a visa officer who held unchallenged power over my fate

And yet—old habits die hard. Ten years is a long time to practice fear.

It is difficult to remember what it feels like to be foundationally safe. For years, any small action felt like it might trigger a bureaucratic downfall: leaving an employer, attending a demonstration, critiquing of the government, even getting a traffic ticket. Risk felt amplified.

Year after year, I bent myself into the required boxes, until I became more withdrawn, more risk-averse, and simply smaller than I once was.

---

A Decade in Deutschland in Numbers

• 8 visas across 2 passports (one expired midway through this decade)

• 9 apartments

• 35 flatmates

• 5 employment contracts

• countless freelance gigs

Endless hours chasing documents, filling out forms, formatting, printing, assembling late into the night. And those were the easy hours.

The harder ones were uncountable: the worry that seeped into every career decision I faced, the constant awareness that my presence was conditional. Every decision ran through the same filter: does this fit my visa?

Every successful renewal was a rush of relief — a breath drawn in deeply and released over the lifecycle of a stamp. At the beginning, I was granted 11 months. Later, two years. Eventually, three years given at a time. But the clock was always ticking, and inevitably at the end of every stretch, I had to come to terms with: “This year is a visa year.” Meaning: this year, I had to be extra careful.

Visa uncertainty and chronic illness share something: when you’re in it, it eclipses everything else. Every plan, every relationship, every dream had to be weighed against an existential threat.

---

Arrival (Sort Of)

Even now, with permanent residency in hand, I haven’t celebrated. On the day I received it, I took this photo outside the Ausländerbehörde—one of many over the years, each a record of survival. Proof that I’d made it another step away from the invisible border where my permit ended.

And yet I don’t feel fully safe. My new status is still conditional: if I live more than six months outside the country, I can lose it. My health bar has risen, but not quite to full.

---

Re-Learning Freedom

A decade of precarity has reshaped me. It taught me how to hold back: to pre-decline my own desires, to tamp down showing up as my most courageous self, to choose the safer path again and again.

Now, acquiring this status means something else: remembering, and re-learning what it feels like to be free.

But freedom does not come automatically. It’s something to practice again.
How do we trust permanence after so many years of conditional belonging?
How do we allow ourselves to be fully here—now, in this time, and in this place?

Maybe freedom is not a door we walk through once, but a journey through a landscape we keep discovering — a place we must learn to inhabit, again and again.

---

Passage

My journey of migration has been one of the privileged ones. With a favoured Canadian passport, my encounters at the visa office were often less hostile — though no less soul-crushing — than what so many others endure.

And yet, these are not just my questions. They belong to millions who live at the mercy of paperwork and politics, measuring life from permit to permit, subject to the constant erosion of safety and belonging.

My papers now say that I am ‘permanent’. The deeper work is teaching my body how to believe it — and building a permanence of belonging that we create together.