The Expat Diaries: Chapter One
Tears. A whole lot of them. They don’t tell you that you’ll cry plenty when you’re starting a new chapter of your life.
I thought an adventure awaited me when things finally fell in place. I got my dream job, in my dream continent, in my dream profile.
Just like I’d envisioned it for years. And what social media led me to believe. Of course there’d be a ‘few’ tears. After all, no postcard-worthy, awe-inspiring online post is as good as it seems.
But never did I picture nights of bawling my eyes out, worrying how or far worse ‘if’ I will ever be successful in this new phase.
It was like a flood of emotions had unleashed within. Yet on the surface I did my best to stay calm and composed.
After all, my own friends and even family members younger than me had their lives sorted and had taken the plunge far before I did.
In a way, I was almost the last to leave the nest. While this did give me solace and help me be more firm with myself (sometimes having to scold myself to stop crying buckets), it didn’t help entirely.
I am an emotional person at heart. And I feel safest in familiar surroundings.
So to take everything I have ever known to be familiar and make it magically disappear – Let’s just say dealing with that wasn’t one of my finest emotionally sound phases of life.
On the surface it all seemed great. For that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?
But the number of times my emotions swung like a pendulum, and I was pulled between the old and new was unfathomable.
I always knew I was going to choose the road going forward, of course. There was no doubt about that.
However, when the road actually appeared in my life, I didn’t know how to deal with it.
Only a handful of my loved ones knew exactly what was happening in my life leading up to the grand reveal to all.
It was by no means a small thing; it was a shift in my life that many well wishers had wanted for years.
Some, as I’d soon realise, wouldn’t exactly be ‘happy’ to hear I got my big break. But that’s ok. To each his own. And by god’s grace I have enough genuine people who truly want to see me happy.
But I digress. Where were we? Tears. Yes. I cried the day I resigned. I cried the day I realised I won’t live with my family anymore. I cried the day it finally sunk it – that I’m going to do this on my own.
Alone. All alone. The girl who was knowing for clinging to her family and friends and only wanted to feel protected and loved. That girl was now going to shift half way across the world to start her own life for the first time.
In hindsight, I should have been more confident. Or maybe just cooler. You know how those cool people make everything seem like a breeze? As if shifting to a new continent is almost as easy as taking an evening walk.
Well, I’m neither. The only thing I’m remotely good at it is putting up a facade even when I’m breaking within.
– – – – –
As the d-day inched closer, the nights seemed to get shorter.
There was so much to do, it sometimes felt like I have no time left. For anything, let alone myself.
Everything was happening at once. The documentation, the farewells, the sharing of ‘I’m finally shifting’ to people who had no clue.
And then to top it all, the planning. Nothing prepared me for the work that goes into making a move to another country.
What to buy, what to take, what essentials will I need now, what can be brought later. 1,001 things that needed my attention, and then some more.
It sounds crazy busy, because it actually was.
I realised how much I ‘don’t’ know. About life, processes, people, situations. And to learn so much in such little time – it almost felt like failing every time I took a step ahead to learn.
All those years of not knowing many things, maybe because I didn’t feel the need to know or learn – Well, as they say, life comes full circle.
So there I was, trying to be prepared for a life I had no clue about. With a toolkit for adulthood that many around me seemed to have hands-on experience with but little that I did.
This is how those months felt. Doing things for the first time, not knowing that this will be the start of many firsts. In both good and I-wish-that-didn’t-happen ways.
