Your Move … From Coping to Creating
On how one might choose a more self-authored life
The Fantasy
When we visit friends “back home” in Canada, whiffs of fantasy linger when aspects of our move get revisited in conversations. The idea of living in a place like Portugal evokes dream-like images of a beach vacation with no return date. No responsibilities, just sun, sand, and unlimited cervejas. Our friends do not even pose it as a question, it’s a given: We escaped reality and teleported into this amazing and enviable life!
Well, yes, sort of, and … You guessed it: There is more. Remember Anushka, one of the early guests on our podcast? Growing up in India, she had visited Vancouver before she moved there as a graduate student. She visited in summer, so she got to know Vancouver as a sunny and warm place. When her studies started in September, days got shorter, rain came, and the city suddenly felt different. For months! Anushka was busy getting set up, buying groceries, cooking, meeting people, finding her groove in her university program, searching for a job … She was far from everyone, feeling lonely.
So yes, we love living in Porto, and the beautiful, summer days are awesome. That’s likely how you’ll see it when you visit as well, and we are happy to take you to our favourite sites (including beaches), and help you make the most of your time. And, if you stay longer, you’ll see us in our daily routines, wearing hoodies in the drafty indoors, giving up on buses that just don’t come, frantically using the translator app as we run errands, waiting months to hear from government offices about various paperwork, teaching past midnight across multiple time zones, waking up to water leaks in the middle of the night. Waiting almost three years to move into our new apartment, because … we don’t really know anymore. Everything takes time, and people just won’t let it upset them. That’s how life is: awesome, and a bit messy. There simply is more to living in a friendly and beautiful place than you might first think.
The Creating Self
The fantasy is reinforced by what we see on social media and in travel brochures. Somewhere between the sea air, the slower mornings, and the curiously photogenic coffee, we are being sold the idea that overseas, you become the kind of person who finally paints, writes, takes photographs, makes pottery, keeps a sketchbook, or says things like, “the light today is marvellous” to neighbours over your morning espressos.
And that does happen sometimes. We know people with stories like that, and a version of that is how Kathy’s life has unfolded since we have moved. Keen on letting go of the 9-to-5, she quickly embraced her creative side. She is now the proud author of a memoir based on a humanitarian mission she joined in Kashmir some years ago, and a unique tête-bêche book on the lives of her parents before they were her parents.
Based on the stories of most people I know, a move does not suddenly turn you into an artist. Yet, a change of scenery and slowing down can help loosen some of the fears, demands, inherited roles (and the sense of obligation to stay in them) that had kept us living small and reactively. A new place somehow makes it more possible to live life on our own terms instead, which often includes some form of creating what we love.
And while “creating” may certainly mean producing art, to me, this term has another meaning, a broader and perhaps more important one. I think of it as actively shaping my life, its rhythm, how I am productive, how I contribute. It is a sense of self that feels more deeply my own. More chosen. More alive. And as a result, more fulfilling.
Many of us may have the seed of creativity in us, it just may not have been given a chance to grow. There was always something more important to do, more pressing, more serious. A career. Prestige. Money. Pleasing. Living life on someone else’s terms.
Your creativity may have shaped your work, perhaps as you contributed ideas inside roles defined by your employer, or by cultural expectations. You may have led teams with creativity: organizing, motivating, and diplomatically surviving in unwelcoming, inflexible, or outright disrespectful systems. You may have infused your creativity into your family life: raising children, paying the mortgage, planning activities, managing a crazy schedule, solving conflicts. Much of it requires ingenuity — but it tends to be creativity in service of expectation, pressure, keeping things together (sort of), rather than being a creative expression of you, your passion, your own sense of wonder.
The Free Self
That is where relocating may become so interesting, with a move thrown into the mix of other changes. Think of a person who leaves full-time employment, or steps away from a role with which everyone associates them. Perhaps they become a consultant, or a freelancer, or a digital nomad (or an influencer?), reducing work to part time. Maybe even living the four-hour workweek dream. Somewhere along the way, their children become independent, the mortgage is paid off, and there is the itch to see what else there is to living. All the pleasing, proving, rushing, over-functioning, or staying small simply for the sake of keeping safe suddenly loosens. (Doesn’t it?!)
Over the past year, Kathy and I have heard our podcast guests describe all kinds of relocations: some eagerly planned and keenly chosen, others accepted with reluctance. The moves may have been motivated by work opportunities, lifelong dreams, or family necessity. Regardless, a big change may finally open (permit, even) new possibilities.
Our move to Portugal did not suddenly make us creative. We both have been enjoying photography for years, and we weren’t new to adding a bit of a creative touch to daily routines: calling into meetings while walking around a park; sending students on little quests around campus during classes; growing a wildflower garden on the balcony; or incorporating our own photography into virtual background scenes for Zoom calls.
Yet the new setting did provide more nourishing conditions for creativity. We have been encountering more beauty in ordinary life, we observe a lot of living taking place in public, we notice more textures. As Kathy likes to say, photography became a way of seeing the world more slowly — including when all we have with us are our mobile phones. Wandering through neighbourhoods, we pause for streetscapes, façades, and markets, and we let the changing moods of the ocean grab our attention. Tile workshops and gallery visits had to do with the appeal of the new culture, but also with taking part in (in the tiniest of ways) keeping old cultural practices alive.
The Applied Self
In contrast to Kathy’s switching the lights off at her full-time job, and jumping into a life of creating, our move did not have the same effect on my professional life. I love what I do, I just told myself a few years ago that I wanted to be selective about work, focusing on pursuits I find meaningful and energizing. I switched from full-time employment to contract consulting and teaching, and I love it. Since the pandemic, most of my work has been online, so when we moved, not much changed. I continue to serve my Canadian clients and students, gradually adding new ones here in the EU.
The move has enriched my work, and it may have stretched my sense of self, and how I apply myself creatively. An interesting part of it is the wider range of traditions and social norms I am working with, including much more formal ways of addressing older and more senior colleagues, but also a bit of a creative licence in how I go about doing things, not being “from here” and all. That part works for me, as it reminds me of how in different places, people had developed different ways of communicating and relating to one another. It stretches my mind without feeling offensive.
As I close, let me tell you a bit more about Kathy’s writing. What has been especially moving to witness is how writing has become her way of meeting life more fully. It has become both a mode of expression and of discovery, reflection, and connection. Through writing, and through engaging with circles of fellow writers who may be exploring poetry, memoirs, dreams, personal stories, and all kinds of imaginative expression, something important has opened up. Writing, or photography, painting, music, or any creative outlet really, is not a hobby or something you do because others do it. It is a deepening into a part of self that may always have been there, but that now has more room, more community, and more reason to come forward and blossom.
Might this kind of creativity be a move towards choosing a truly self-authored life?
Every week, Relocurious brings you a podcast episode featuring a unique story of someone on the move, or a reflection post like this one. We’d love to hear how you are handling the ups and downs of relocating. To start a conversation, would you tell us a bit about your journey?