Every morning, I watch the water in the Thames River as my daughter and I take our three-minute ferry ride from Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf.  As we get closer to the Wharf side, I can start to see the tall buildings of London in the background – the Shard, the Gherkin, St. Pauls.  My eyes come back to the shoreline and I look upon the brick buildings of the Docklands.  Every morning, I think “ahhhh”.
That bliss is not to understate how hard it is to move to London with a two year old.  It also doesn’t take into consideration when she is throwing a tantrum on that ferry, when the to walk to the ferry is the pouring rain, or when the ferry suddenly stops for low-tide, leaving me stranded on either side.  We moved here because our values were still very much screaming “travel”.  Our move to London disrupted everything – life, work, thoughts, routine.  And while it is hard, hard work, it is in this disruption that I am incredibly grateful and feeling satiated.
For the past couple years (let’s say two), I started harboring an antsy-ness.  Maybe it was the birth of my daughter.  Maybe it was feeling confined.  Maybe it was winter.   I worked on convincing myself that there was something wrong with me, that I shouldn’t need a drastic change to feel better.  It festered.  I told myself that a better, stronger, more mature person would simply change their everyday circumstances without needing a change of scenery.  That their maturity would show them that all of the things that they had “built” in this one place simply shouldn’t, couldn’t be left.
It’s dawned on me now that I made that my Calgary story.  That story was at complete odds with how I’d lived my life up until I moved to Calgary.
When we moved to Calgary in 2008, I told myself, “this move is about work (work, and getting mat leave)”.  I would use this move to move up the career ladder, to prove to everyone who would listen that I was not just going to order cupcakes for them.  (No one really listened.)  I made everything about work, my whole identity was work. Even when it wasn’t work, it was work.   My brother-in-law told me when we moved to Calgary, with all of our stories, “this isn’t your last move.”  “Oh, yes it is. We’re putting down roots.”
It almost happened too.  We almost bought that big house that would have kept us there.  And I would have loved that house, but it wouldn’t have released me from my story.  I even thought about leaning more into the story.  I could play that role!  I could do it!  For all my early resistance not to move to Calgary (I was one of “those” Americans who had never been to Canada), once I was there, it grew on me.  My neighborhood.  The Stampede.  The mountain air.  I loved it.
I have loved all the places I’ve lived as they’ve each had their own uniqueness and their own special place in my life.  That should have been a key component of how I lived in Calgary.  It should have been a place that was part of my journey.  But I made a mistake, I tried to make it the end of the story.  I tried to tell myself that Calgary would be where we would give up our gypsy lifestyle.  That it would be about stability.  About family. About home buying.  About being adults.  And most of all, about work.  I did great at this story.  Check house, check kid, check career.  And about five years into it, I got really bored and really, really frustrated.  I told my coach before I left, “I don’t feel like I was really myself here.”  It was the most depressing, regret-filled moment I think I’ve ever had.
Had I seriously just spend six years being someone else?  Yes, no, yes.  Of course I was me, but in my zeal to work and to advance, I shoved that gypsy loving gal in the closet and tried to blend in.  I tried with all of my might to be Canadian, to be from Calgary.  Of course, I still touted my American and it was with that zeal that I tried to become Albertan.  When we moved to Calgary I was a die-hard liberal, wanting to work on a farm and shun the tar-sands, and I left a nice fiscal conservative with a whole new appreciation for how integrated oil is into our lives, whether people want to admit it or not.  None of this was fake, I wasn’t faking myself, but I kept so much my previous lives outside of myself.  Only a very, very few saw glimmers of all that was stored in the closet.
In London, this crowded, dirty city, I finally feel like I can breathe.  In the midst of the people and the noise, I feel more like me.  It has nothing to do with Calgary, and everything to do with me releasing the story about the me in Calgary.  There are still pieces I’m hanging on to and that is why I’m writing – to shake them loose.
My New Years resolution this year is “no expectations”.  There is nothing to expect, nothing to keep bottled up anymore.  I’ve written some very real feelings here, but some of the most important, I’ve kept hidden away.  The frustration I have caused myself by not writing, by not telling my stories – the things that I have seeking, building, and trying to achieve – was destroying me.  I wish I had the courage to write them as they were happening, to share what was real and meaningful for me, and to trust that those who knew me would hold those stories with care.
I leave the ferry dock each morning feeling peaceful.  My husband is at work, my daughter at school, and I set forth to start my day. For me, the disruption of changing scenery, soothes my soul.  It is hard, hard work at times, but it calms me down.  It lets me see new things, and it directs my focus to only the very important pieces of life.  This is my new story, one of exploration and curiosity, one of connection to those I hold dear, and one that I’ve finally given myself permission to live.

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