When we don’t know our next destination
A stressful aspect of mobile life, in my experience, is when we live in total uncertainty about our next destination.
There is a whole world of feelings and practicalities linked to the idea of the “next destination”. And the relief one experiences when finally getting one is immense. It happened to me yesterday, when my husband confirmed that he is going to work in Jakarta, after months of waiting, virtually touring the world, hoping, swallowing disappointments, and trying to project ourselves in a future where we could not see any further than this summer.
The bliss and relief I experienced at the news made feel like wanting to share some of the typical moments expats go through when the end of the contract gets closer or it has already ended and there is no destination in sight.
The feeling of uncertainty surrounds the future
The first and most obvious feeling is the uncertainty that surrounds the future. I believe no one likes not to know for long where she’ll spend her future year(s). Apart from practicalities (will it be in a cold or warm climate? what language shall I have to use in my next destination? how far will it be from my passport country? how expensive will it be to fly to and fro?, etc.), there is the fact that the place were we live is basic for our projects. And since my projects are very important to me, I need to know how and when I’ll be able to develop them or launch new ones, and I can’t do it if I do not know where I’ll live in the next months. As long as you have no future destination, you live in a bubble of suspension, and depending on how adventurous or resilient you are, you might go from feeling very excited to very depressed.
The problem with children
If you have children in school age there is the worry about having a place where they can start the new school year. And let me tell you that this makes the whole difference in the world. Knowing that from September I won’t have to worry about school and school calendar fills me with an enormous sense of freedom, which is the only antidote to the sense of loss that grabs me when I think my nest will soon empty.
People’s questions
People in general do not help a lot when you have no destination. I wrote very clearly about it in The Dreaded Question nr 3: they seem to be possessed by this terrible urge to know where you’ll go next, and what is certainly a way to express love and genuine care for you, can turn into the worst nightmare when you are asked over and over and over again “where will you go next? Do you already have a destination?“. I can assure you that one of my biggest satisfactions in life is to be able to answer these questions with: “YES. We go to Indonesia“.
We feel protagonists again
There is another marvelous side to all this. When you finally get the YES message, when the last signature is put down on the contract, when you can start playing with days and making plans for the months ahead, you feel like finally the world has recognized that you exist and has taken you into account. The feeling of powerlessness you experience when months go by and nothing turns up can be very heavy. Of course we are lucky and can afford the privilege of waiting because we have enough means to live well even without working for a while. But if the wait for the next destination gets long, you have to resort to all your optimism and lessons learned from past experiences if you don’t want your self-esteem to fall to underground levels.
The virtual tour of the world
The other aspect I find stressful on the long run it the virtual tour of the world you go through when you apply to positions and think to have reasonable chances to get them. What happens to me is that I feel immediately projected to that specific place, I look for information (always starting from the quality of the Internet connection, of course) and develop a sort of attachment to it. When nothing comes out of it, I have to shut that chapter and I always do it with a pang of sadness, because my relationship with my hosting country starts the moment the opportunity arises.
This is why this time with Indonesia I refused to even write Jakarta in Google. I forced myself to avoid collecting information, look at the climate, at how long it takes to fly there, and if I came across someone who had lived there I carefully avoided to talk about the country.
Now I leave you because I have loads of things to find out 🙂 And by the way, my cat’s second name, given to her by my neighbors who could not pronounce the complicated Grigiotta, is Jakarta. I should have taken this as an omen.