There's a lot that has happened over the last few months. Leaving one country, moving to another, adopting a new modality and outlook on life. I hoarded things before. I held on to them because I felt they brought security. I could do anything I needed or wanted to when I needed or wanted to. I think that was overwhelming in most aspects. I had the stuff (crap) to do everything, and ended up doing nothing. The same nothing. All the time.
Some of it is coming back, separated by months for shipping and preparation. Most of it is staying behind. A houseful of 6 years of collecting crap with more money than sense reduced to 150 cubic feet (less, because that was what my whole family had for space allocation). I've been thinking a lot about what I packed to bring with and what I have currently. I am honestly glad to have reduced. There have definitely been things I feel the pangs of loss for, but nothing that I don't recognize I might be better off without.
I have spent the last several months trucking on, doing my job, spending my evenings crocheting and watching things with my kiddos. I still enjoy going out and Thrifting for DvDs and other things we need. I feel like I have been going through the motions though. These last few days I have been trying to find myself in all of this change.
There is not a lot of structure in what I am putting up here. It is just raw, unfiltered, brain to hands on keyboard rambling. So I think it might be useful to do some background.
In 2016 I got my first job in Cybersecurity direct work. I had been managing a helpdesk team at a small University, and while Cyber was part of my role I didn't have enough opportunity to pursue it fully. This role was with a small service provider in the US. Over the 9 years and 11 months I worked there I would go from being a Systems Admin to lead Cyber Architect and ISMS co-lead. It was a constant growth of responsibility. I was happy, but overworked.
Just before COVID I got, what I thought, was my dream job. So I worked out how to keep my Architecture role and my whole family packed up and moved to Colorado so I could teach Cybersecurity. About 18 months later the school I was at laid off the instructional staff to replace us, and I got a different second job as a consultant. The kind of corporate Business to Business work that drives people insane with high expectations and no work/life balance. It was eating me alive when another role in education came up through some former colleagues.
I almost literally jumped at the chance to be the associate director of Cybersecurity education for a bootcamp. It was a mistake. 10 months of mistake. I don't even want to talk about it. It was just AWFUL. 16 hour days were the norm and I was trying to manage 2 teams in timezones 12 hours apart.
My whole team put in their notice all at once the day I put in mine. I hadn't planned it that way. It just kinda happened. I think that's all I have to say about that...
Then I spent the next 5 years working for a large software company writing education courses. It was a lot of stress and rolling layoffs. The work was not too bad, but the constant fear of layoffs was killing me. Especially because I was working both of these jobs to afford a lifestyle I would not have been if I lost one. We had bought a house, we moved to the middle of nowhere. It wasn't even the work, it was the stress.
Then the 2024 election happened. I was still working for a Cybersecurity services provider doing work that was important in an industry that I could see going in bad directions. I had vulnerable family, I had a skillset that could be misused, and I did not want to keep on with that. So, we resolved to leave the United States. At first the plan was simple. My company had offices in France and Germany, so I could just get transferred (or so I was told). Spoiler: that is not what happened.
After working with my employer for almost a year to get transferred, it was clear there were more hurdles to jump over than I had time to deal with. I began looking into the process, found a job, got a Visa, and we moved to Germany. I had been born here. I had visited a LOT as a child, teenager, and young adult. I spoke the language.
Adjusting has been hard. It's been just over 4 months at this point. My kids are learning German, my spouse is learning German, and everything is slowly settling into place. My dog seems to have adjusted from moving from a farm to the middle of a big city. The adjustments and changes have been a lot more than I was expecting, and in ways I did not expect.
Starting over, having to find housing (we got put in a temporary apartment by our relocation agency. I should not have hired a relocation agency ... ), working through Probezeit making it nigh impossible to find said housing, adjusting to a change in salary. All of it has been a lot to do at once. In this, and having a better work-life balance, I realized how much of my last decade was ... work. My personality became my job, my field of professional and academic study became everything I was. I was unhealthily careening into a mode of thought that had nothing to do with being a person and everything to do with being a vehicle for capitalism.
I have had time to discover, if nothing else, that I lost myself. I need to find myself again. I am a human being, and I am more than my work. I am more than what can be profited off of. So I have been trying to operate with more intention. I have been trying to stay calmer, and follow through on plans. I have been trying to eat healthier, and engage in hobbies. I started listening to music again. Not just to fill in the noise with some curated algorithmic playlist, but putting on an album and actually appreciating the artists. I have started reading fiction (largely because of being pushed by my spouse, but it's better for me ... and I enjoy it more than I express, I think). I kept up with Crochet and (owning the things for) playing games, but I have actually started *doing* these things intentonally. I want to play games more, but in the four months I have been here I have played more games with my kids than I have in the last 5 years.
I have growing to do, planning to do, and intentions to follow through on. But I think I am getting there. I hope ...