Since moving to England, I have had a number of random ideas for blog posts and videos but have posted very few of them. On the video side, it’s often about taking the time to sit down and edit. But I don’t always and then I end up with tons of material and feeling overwhelmed by how much I have to do.
On the writing side, I would get caught up in trying to fill in all of the details since I last posted before I felt like I could get into what I wanted to say. I would also get stuck on the desire to have my wording be perfect, both at capturing my meaning and drawing in the reader.
I’m attempting to move past that.
So I’m going to dedicate this post to my “last few years” summary, with a reduction (though not erasure) of my perfectionist tendencies.
I spent Covid looking for work and motivation. I sort of found the one, in the form of a short-term internship and the other in fits and starts. Then, one of my friends began talking about looking into graduate schools abroad which I thought was a cool idea. But I was definitely burnt out from Hunter’s foolishness during undergrad—poor accessibility causing me to pivot majors and spend far longer in school than I needed to—so didn’t feel it was for me. I didn’t think I would be back in school for some time or ever.
Early 2022, I remembered my desire to travel. I never did get to study abroad because of the aforementioned Hunter shenanigans and I wanted to think about doing so again. I looked into a TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language)certification so that I could teach English in other countries, but those attempts failed. I should have given myself a longer break from schooling. Then I began to Google how one could travel without money. Volunteering was one option, I remembered my former aspirations of joining the Peace Corps. But I did not think I was in the right mindset for it anymore. Other options were housesitting for people in foreign countries, finding a remote job and just traveling or becoming a student. I still wasn’t the most excited about going back to school, but perhaps a complete shake-up would be what I needed. Go big or stay home, right?
Though I had looked for jobs in Canada, for some reason, it never crossed my mind as a place to go to school. To be clear, I had nothing at all against Canadian education, I’d just remembered my former desire to visit and live in England. With the added insight from Covid, I didn’t want to go somewhere where, if another shut down were to happen, I would have no one. While I have family in Canada, I don’t know them, unlike my aunt in England whom I’d visited a few years earlier and spoke to semiregularly. I also thought about France since I was learning French and thought a full imersion experience (outside of coursework, of course) could be amazing.
There was some anxiety about visa timings and when the schools would make their decisions. But everything ultimately worked out and, two weeks after getting approved for my visa, I was off (flying on the day the queen passed… that was surreal.)
The following three years would find me graduating with an MA in creative writing, performing in a choir at Disneyland Paris, getting engaged (I have a post about meeting him here), exploring other areas of the UK (and Ireland), becoming an audiobook narrator and traveling to Senegal, St. Vincent, and several Mediterranean countries. When I summarize it all like that, it sounds impressive. I think it is. But the every day wasn’t, and still isn’t always that glamorous. Those are the aspects I’ve been intending to blog about. Hopefully, writing all of this out will help me unlock the rest of it.