Many years ago, while I was working in public relations consultancy, we gave one of my favourite clients a giant stuffed dog – it was sort of an ‘in-joke’ and was really a Christmas gift for his daughter. It was at the end of a long, stressful and emotional project and it gave us all a much-needed laugh. I know we spoke about it at the time, exchanged holiday wishes and collapsed into our respective corners.
A couple of months later, each of us on this client’s team received a formal thank you letter. In it, he expressed his gratitude for the gift and our work. I vividly remember him saying to me that he had left it so long that he was almost embarrassed to send it but decided that what he wanted to say needed to be said – regardless how potentially embarrassing it was.
Now there’s a lot to be learned in this experience about gratitude and how we treat people with whom we work but I’ll save that for another day. The point of this story today is that I was almost too embarrassed by this blog’s long hiatus to start writing again. And while I’m not sure that what I have to say is too important to keep to myself, it would be truly shameful not to thank all of you who have followed this little blog from the beginning and who have shared words of encouragement, cajoling and support. I’m truly humbled and grateful that anyone reads anything that I write, and occasionally overwhelmed by the people who find what I have to say here interesting.
The missing months
These missing months, as I think we’ll refer to them from now on, have been busy. The short version is that I went back to work and that turned out to be quite an adventure, and while it was an amazing experience, it set me off on another path that I didn’t quite expect. I’ll share more about that very soon.
The two things that I do want to share are the things that made it hardest for me to write.
Firstly, I stopped feeling like an expat. Surrounded by ‘locals’, working day in and day out with them, I began to feel like I wasn’t actually living an expat life. I appreciate that this is ridiculous. I mean, what exactly is an expat life? But I started to feel very cut-off from my expat tribe, not able to relate to the experiences of my friends, peers and fellow bloggers.
Secondly, its been hard to love our location over these last few months. Ironically, at a time when I was feeling less and less in touch with the expat world, we have experienced more negativity, stress and drama over our status here in the US in the last few months than at any other time. While we have good friends and a sense of community, Texas, you’ve been a challenge recently…..
Expiry date
In the middle of all of this is the reality that our time here in the US is coming to an end. There’s a final expiry date in our passports now and it has helped me to focus my mind on creating the sort of ‘expat life’ that I want to lead.
Its also focused me on trying to make our last 18 months or so here in the US the best they can possibly be. That means changing the negative voices in my head and taking a more positive approach to our life here.
I hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride…….