A colonizer is always angry, because a colonizer is always guilty.
A colonizer is always violent, because a colonizer is always afraid.

A colonizer is always angry and afraid because a colonizer is never home.

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Lately I started getting words for it, this Colonizer Homelessness, the fact that colonizers look and feel like aliens to natives not only because they don’t belong, but because the colonizers themselves feel the same way.

Think about it: wherever a colonizer goes, whatever they see, smell, or taste, it is never theirs, or completely natural for them.

Not part of their upbringing, not part of their story. Not part of who they are. It is not organic to them, but engineered; their whole existence is.

Whatever sustains and nourishes the native, threatens the colonizer and reflects their strangeness: the food, the music, the landscape, the flora and fauna. the sounds and smells, everything.

Whatever comes naturally to the native is a great effort for the colonizer: they don’t understand the codes, and never will. They can’t be still.

A colonizer is not an immigrant, a tourist, or a guest, they have to find meaning for their stay. It must be a higher purpose, a higher calling, or else what can explain both their presence not home, and the violent means they always need to maintain it?

We are not designed to inflict pain and injury for comfort. We need a story to put us in a positive light.

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So much of the Western world’s anxiety, I think, is just a colonizer’s latent, repressed homelessness. Because colonialism is not just taking other people’s home, it is also, and forever, being without one yourself.