The symposium also had a strong community dimension. The organisers emphasised that the event was created as a space where women with diverse migration experiences—academic, professional, social, and artistic—could come together. Its purpose was to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, foster relationships, provide support, and strengthen female solidarity abroad. An important aspect of the event was also the promotion of Portraits of Emigration, a quarterly magazine publishing the stories of Polish women living outside their homeland.

That is enough when it comes to presenting the facts. For more details, I encourage readers to visit the website and social media channels of the main organiser, as I would like to focus instead on my own feelings and emotions connected with the symposium—on what taking part in it gave me and what I will carry within me for many weeks and months to come.

The Symposium of Polish Women in Ireland left me with something far more lasting than simply the memory of a well-organised event. I would go as far as to say that it was the finest Polish community event I have ever attended, outstanding in terms of its academic value, technical execution, and genuine care for people’s well-being. Everything was impeccable: the quality and preparation of the speakers, the sound system, the lighting, the breaks, and the catering facilities.

Special recognition should be given to the symposium’s informational materials, particularly the programme magazine containing detailed schedules, topics, and comprehensive biographies of all participants. The biographies were written in such a way that one could truly understand who each person was, what they represented, where and how they worked, and what they had achieved. And this is where I offer my deepest appreciation: at this symposium, everyone was somebody. Behind every person stood years of work, achievements, and experience. There were no empty personalities or superficial appearances. Every lecture, panel discussion, presentation, and contribution carried genuine value.

For me, the greatest gift of the symposium was the opportunity to engage with something I rarely encounter in my everyday life—the world of academic lectures. They helped organise many of the intuitive and emotional experiences I have struggled with for years as an emigrant, experiences I had never been able to fully name or discuss. When researchers spoke about integration, cultural identity, migratory loneliness, and the psychological costs of living between two countries, I felt as though someone was finally giving words to what I—and undoubtedly many other women—have carried within ourselves for years.

Science was not merely a collection of dry facts, charts, and statistics. Through the words spoken on stage, it became a mirror reflecting everyday experiences. What was particularly valuable was that the lectures did not stop at diagnosing problems; they also offered solutions, support mechanisms, and ways of building a sense of belonging in a new reality.

I left with the feeling that I had participated not simply in a conference, but in a gathering of experiences, emotions, and stories shared by women who, although coming from different places and living very different lives, understand one another without the need for endless explanations. What united us was emigration. And emigration is a language in itself.

The panel discussions were equally meaningful. Their greatest strength was authenticity. There was no artificial distance between experts and participants. Honest conversations emerged about working below one’s qualifications, raising children between two cultures, feelings of guilt towards family members left behind in Poland, but also about success, courage, and female solidarity.

It was during these discussions that I felt most strongly how powerful a shared experience can be. A single sentence spoken by another woman on stage often brought relief and understanding regarding issues that had affected me and with which I had sometimes struggled alone.

It is also worth emphasising that the more renowned the speaker, the greater her humility, modesty, and ability to listen—not only to fellow panellists but also to the women she met and spoke with during informal conversations behind the scenes.

The informal conversations outside the official programme proved equally moving. Those brief exchanges over coffee, during lunch, and the spontaneous stories shared with laughter—and sometimes with tears in the eyes—outside the lecture hall completed the experience. Each of these conversations served as a reminder that emigration is rarely, if ever, a simple story of either success or failure. Rather, it is a constant balancing act between hard work and carving out moments for rest and connection with loved ones, between building a new life and preserving one’s roots.

Meeting Polish women who face similar dilemmas gave me a sense of security and reassurance that I am not alone and do not have to carry everything by myself. I met so many remarkable women that, in virtually every area of my own work and interests, I now know someone I can turn to for advice.

I left the symposium enriched not only with knowledge but, above all, with a profound sense of community. In Ireland, that sense of community resonated everywhere. It could be felt in the long-standing projects undertaken by the same dedicated individuals, in the academic research demonstrating that it was here, in Ireland, that women managed to build strong foundations for further development and for institutions serving not only the Polish community but society more broadly. I left Dublin with the conviction that behind all of this lies hard work, determination, and a genuine attentiveness to the needs of the people who live there.

The event showed that emigration does not have to mean loneliness. It can become a space for creating new bonds, nurturing female solidarity, and empowering one another. In a world that so often requires emigrants—and particularly women living abroad—to constantly prove their worth, the opportunity to meet women who say, “I understand you; I feel the same,” provides the strength to persevere and keep moving forward.

The symposium and the words of many women left me with several thoughts that will stay with me:

“I will not give up.”

“Pay attention to the people you surround yourself with when carrying out a project, because they are the guarantee of its successful completion.”

“Behind everything that turns out well, there must first and foremost be hard work.”

I may have already known these things, but they would never have become so deeply rooted within me, nor remained so vividly in my memory, had I not overcome my initial reluctance and made the journey to Dublin.

One of the most painful aspects of life abroad is loneliness. It is not dramatic. There are no cinematic scenes or grand declarations. It arrives quietly, together with exhaustion, overstimulation, and the constant habit of postponing human connections until “later.” I come home from work and no longer have the energy for another conversation, another meeting, another phone call. I devote myself to creative work, which I also do in solitude, because it requires isolation from the world and immersion in my own thoughts. And so I drift further away from people, creating a vicious cycle of loneliness that, from the outside, often looks simply like ordinary adult life.

As emigrants, we lose something we rarely noticed before: those small, everyday micro-connections—a brief conversation with a neighbour, a spontaneous coffee with a friend, or unexpectedly running into someone we know on the street. These little moments once gave us a sense of belonging and security in our homeland.

Today, contact still exists: messages, communicators, voice notes, social media reels. Yet the body knows that it is not the same. Human beings do not need communication alone; they need presence. They need shared laughter, shared silence, and simply sitting together at a table. They need another person beside whom they do not have to explain everything from the beginning.

Modern society has very effectively sold us comfort as the remedy for everything. Yet people often find true well-being not in convenience, but in relationships—in a presence that is neither fast nor perfect, but real. And that is exactly what I felt there, within the walls of Trinity College Dublin: that another human being cannot be replaced by anything—not by an app, not by a screen, not even by the greatest degree of self-sufficiency.

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