A Reflection on Migration, Encounter, and Meaning

By Somayeh McKian

Certified Psychotherapist, In-Training Logotherapist, Gender Studies Scholar, & Published Author

When I first returned to Iran, almost four years ago, my niece Roshanan was only a few months old. I remember her as a baby, someone whose life had barely begun. During my absence, she grew up. When I returned again, she was approaching her fifth birthday, in two months.

Between these two moments, an entire childhood had unfolded. She had learned to speak, made friends, developed her own understanding of the world, and begun to form memories. Yet she had never really known me. Our occasional video calls had given her a face and a name, but not the experience of sharing a life with me.  When we met, I was her aunt, but I was also a stranger.

I had lived with the geographical reality of migration for years. What I had not fully understood was how migration could alter one's place in the lives of others. While I was elsewhere, a child in my own family had grown up without knowing me. I had remained part of her family history, but I was absent from her lived experience.  In the first days of our encounter, Roshanan sometimes spoke about me as though I were another person.

"Do you know Somayeh is coming?" she asked me the first day we met. "She's from abroad, from abroad."

"Where is abroad?" I asked.

"Somewhere that isn't here," she replied. "Outside here."

Whew you have been? I asked.

"I was inside my mother's tummy, inside the body. But I didn't really like staying inside the body. I wanted to come outside the body. Outside"

"Why?"

"Because I really love life."

Why? I asked.

"Because all the people, all the people are so beautiful. And all my friends are here."

She was sitting on a chair in my room while I lay on my bed. The conversation lasted perhaps a minute. She was talking to me about myself without knowing that I was the person she was describing.  I was listening to a child speak about Somayeh, the woman who was coming from abroad. But where, in that moment, was the Somayeh she was talking about?

I was physically present, yet I existed in her imagination as someone elsewhere. She knew of me without knowing me. And I found myself caught in an unsettling position: I was both the person being spoken about and the stranger listening. What a mess! Anxious  moments?

The question that arose in me was not simply how I had become a stranger to my niece. It was where I myself had gone in the years I had been away. What had happened to the self who belonged to the place from which I had departed? Had migration carried that self somewhere distant, or had it gradually become obscured, even to me? where I am ?

The people we leave behind continue living, changing, and forming relationships in which we have no direct participation. Meanwhile, we develop elsewhere, becoming someone shaped by experiences that those people have not shared. I think the continuity between who we have been, who we have become, and how others remember us can become difficult to recognise.

Perhaps this was what made the encounter so strange. I was not merely seeing how much Roshanan had grown since she was a baby. I was confronting the fact that, during those years, I had existed outside the ordinary unfolding of her life. In her world, I had become a person from elsewhere. There was another dimension to this encounter that I could not separate from my reflection on life itself.

At four years old, Roshanan had experienced war for the first time. During the war and bombarding by  the United States, and Israel, she heard the sounds of bombs. Her parents tried to protect her as best they could, playing loud music inside the house or finding other ways to distract her from the frightening sounds outside.

I cannot know precisely what she experienced internally, what she understood, or what remained with her. I know only that she was very young and that the adults around her tried to create some distance between her and the sounds of danger.

When I heard her speak about loving life, I could not ignore this part of her experience. I did not interpret her words as evidence that the war had left no mark on her. Nor did I want to turn them into a reassuring story about childhood innocence. A child can love life and still be frightened by it,  the presence of one experience does not erase the other.

What struck me was the coexistence of these realities. She had already encountered something of the world's capacity for violence, yet when she spoke about why she wanted to enter the world, she referred to the beauty of people and the presence of her friends.

Her answer was relational. Life was desirable because others were there.

This brought me back to a question that has accompanied my engagement with Logotherapy and Existential Analysis: how do we understand the relationship between the individual, the world, and the meanings that become possible through our existence?

In Viktor Frankl's thinking, the self is not understood only through introspection or as something sealed off from the world. Human existence involves a movement beyond oneself, toward people, tasks, values, and possibilities that call for a response. Meaning is not simply an idea we construct by looking inward; it can emerge through our encounter with what lies beyond us.

I do not want to suggest that Roshanan's brief answer illustrates Frankl's theory in any straightforward way. She was not making a philosophical argument, and I cannot know all that her words meant to her. But her answer made me consider how closely our experience of life can be bound to our experience of others.

For her, the world was not an abstract concept. It was populated by people she found beautiful and friends with whom she shared her days. Her words brought the question of meaning out of the realm of explanation and back into the immediacy of lived experience.

Perhaps this was also why I found the encounter so unsettling. While she spoke about the world she loved, I was confronted with my own relationship to the world I had left and the one in which I now lived. I had spent years crossing the distance between places, maintaining connections, and building a life elsewhere. Yet, in that room, I became aware of a different kind of distance: the distance between my own sense of self and the person I had become in the experience of someone who did not know me.

I had been thinking about migration as something I had experienced. Through Roshanan, I encountered it as something that had also shaped the experience of others. My absence had become part of her world, not as a memory of a person she had known, but as the idea of someone who lived somewhere else.

The two photographs I now place beside each other, the baby she was when I first returned and the child she has become, hold this distance in a visible form. They show the passage of time, but they also make visible what cannot be captured in a photograph: the relationship that did not yet exist between us, the years in which we remained almost strangers, and the possibility of knowing one another that began with our meeting.

I am left with questions rather than conclusions. How does migration reshape our sense of who we are? When the people who belong to our lives know us only through fragments, where does our sense of continuity reside? And how might we understand the self not as something permanently lost or securely possessed, but as something that continues to take shape through our encounters with others and the world?

I cannot say that my conversation with Roshanan answered these questions. What it did was bring them closer to me.

I had returned to meet my niece. Instead, I also encountered a question about myself: what remains of us in the places we leave, and what becomes possible when we return and are seen, for the first time, through someone else's eyes?