Expat epiphanies

The day you decide to leave your adopted country as an expat is as memorable as the day you arrived. 

My plan for a research sabbatical at a university in Norway was to stay as long as money allowed me. The not-a-plan plan. I left the USA for Norway with no concrete ending date and a work permit for only six months. But I had vacated my apartment and put my things in storage on the chance that I would stay longer in Norway. Or move on to somewhere else. 

Divorcing myself from my belongings and apartment in San Francisco was an opportunity to take myself on a scubadiving tour – a swimabout –  of southeast Asia for another six months if my sabbatical in Norway failed. I would either find my purpose in another country, i.e. career or relationship (or both!), or leave. 

The gods gave their answer. They made sure to give me just enough money to keep my projects going, to keep me interested in my scientific career path in Norway, while allowing me to fool around more outside of lab. So I ended up in a worse scenario – career limbo. The situation where you know you are just hanging on for the paycheck, but it’s OK because you’re having a lot of fun outside of the job. Although studying the development of human brain tumors is not exactly a useless way of making a living.

The money, like my social life in Norway, was a tease, a tease that my career was going somewhere, but it really wasn’t, and never would. After seven years, just as my project was about to blossom with collaborators in several countries in Europe, the money ended. 

The end had always been looming over me. Every day I was in Norway, I considered plan B. But on my last year of funding, with only an outside hope of a renewal, the end was in sight, possibly even the end to my career as I knew it. I was stuck. I was stuck in between a project I loved and wanted to see the conclusion to, and moving on with my life. 

The truth was Norway was a dead end for me professionally. I realized it in the same moment I achieved my greatest success in my career – winning a prestigious grant from the Norwegian Cancer Society. The department created an unnecessary drama around it that as an American, not understanding the politics of the situation, I made worse by asking questions. Positive input from my own colleagues would have at least let me know they supported my project, or me. But they let the situation fester to protect their own interests. The game was over for me before my project began. I realized I was on my own.

I already had the urge to move on at the four-year mark in Norway, just before I got the grant. Then I got the grant. I talked myself into three more years in Europe working on a project I could never have gotten the funding for in the USA. I pushed for a resolution to the department declining my grant for whatever reason. A reasonable trade-off for staying longer to work on the project was another three years to explore the possibility of a relationship. At some point, I realized only Mr. Incredible would have kept me in Norway.

The project worked, but too slowly. So I faced many unknowns in the last months of my three years of funding. Before the decision came through on my grant, my boss agreed to extend my contract for another three months at the beginning of the next year so I could finish my paper. When the renewal didn’t come through, I was set to stay a little while longer. I believed three months would turn into the year I needed to give my project the chance to grow into what I knew it could be.

But one morning I woke up. 

I woke up with the thought in my head, it’s time to leave. Now. That staying in Norway until my paper was accepted was procrastinating. Leaving it up to chance, the gods again. That I could go home for Christmas to southern California, and not come back to Norway in the worst part of the winter for just three months. Three months was not enough time to start any serious experiments. I’d just hang out in Bergen until the end. I could resubmit my paper and write a response to reviewers just as easily from sunny southern California as Bergen, in winter.

My “aha” moment. Christmas in SoCal and another round of approval and money for a work permit of only three months. It wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t talk myself into staying after I had come to that realization. I was delaying the inevitable. The neurons in my brain created a connection, a connection I couldn’t interrupt, reroute, destroy.

This sudden insight upended my life. I had only six weeks to go before my visa ended. You can make a lot happen fast once you’ve made a decision. The time consuming part of any action you ultimately take is in figuring out what you want to do. Once I made the decision, just as in San Francisco before I Ieft, I worked through a list of tasks to get me home again. There is no time to procrastinate. My time was up and I had to get out of there. 

I worked every day until late in the lab to tie things up. My furniture was either sold or donated to homes for asylum seekers. I overbooked myself as it was the holiday season (and I feel eternally bad for that), and I was canceling utilities until the last few hours I was in Norway. I left with the two bags I came with. And I sent the souvenirs of my life in Norway home for a ridiculous price, and for the most part haven’t used them yet.

My paper was accepted shortly after I arrived home on the next to the last day of the year. And I didn’t have to perform any other experiments. To celebrate, I booked a dive trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia at the earliest date possible. Then I booked another dive trip to Komodo on my favorite liveaboard – it was discounted and over my birthday. Then I booked three months of diving in Indonesia, Tasmania and the Philippines.

I had a plan for my travel over the next few months, but not for what was going to come after that. My second epiphany came at a university talk I gave that turned into a job interview. During the interview, I had this overwhelming feeling of starting at the bottom of a career path that I had been already on for a couple of decades. I thought, I will be physically ill if I have to perform another experiment at the lab bench.

A lackluster ending to a career at the bench that had some stellar moments with some incredible people.

So while I was traveling across southeast Asia, I started my own business as a writer and an editor. I mostly edit papers, but this is difficult work, translating the language of scientific results of other authors into simple English.

I suppose the idea to leave the lab bench had been brewing for years. I was using my career as a vehicle to navigate the world. A not so glamorous way to live in cities other than the one I was born in, but it worked. Moving to Norway turned out to be the first step to ending that career.

The work since then has not been easy. But my creative well was full. I’ve written three books since then, two about my travels and the third, an adventure romance novel that is mostly influenced by my travels. And my work is wherever my computer (or my camera or my paintbrush) is.

It’s the unknown most days, just like my experiments.

Books…

Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)

postcards to me (2022)

An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)

Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square