I have always felt there were many versions of me. Each person I know brings out a different side of my personality. I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my husband when I not only realised that I loved him, but I loved the person I became when I was with him.

I feel like each place I have lived has transformed and redefined me. My experience in Korea was shaped by being on the outside looking in. There's no hiding being a foreigner in Korea. People stare and point. Young people say hello and then run away giggling. My body language changed. I bowed
all the time.

Dubai taught me how to open and close my eyes at the same time. I learned not to offer to shake hands with men, but holding hands with women was fine. Rules are often applied depending on who you are and which passport you hold, so I mostly lived knowing that rules didn't really apply to me, or at least knowing which ones did and which ones could be conveniently ignored.

One of the challenges of adapting to life back in Canada is figuring out how to be myself in the confines of the framework of Canadian society. It seems like I charged into Dubai like a bull. Things happened quickly. Being bold worked for me. Halifax is more of an easing. There’s no pushing your way into Atlantic Canada. It will let you in when it’s good and ready.

It is taking some time to shed my Dubai skin – the person I became there is still very much a part of me. You don’t let go of seven years in Arabia in a few months.

I'm much more conservative now. The Dubai-me sees young women and girls wearing next to nothing and thinks ‘put some clothes on’. I’m not saying women should walk around in burkas, but I don’t think overly sexualizing ourselves is any more liberating. Perhaps that's just me getting older.

I’m getting used to being able to touch my husband in public. Even hand-holding can be frowned on in Dubai, so kissing goodbye in public or walking with our arms around each other is something I am relearning and enjoying.

I’m also learning to look at people again. As a woman, walking through the streets of Dubai, there is a whole world of unwanted male attention waiting to be had. I learned that it was easier to avoid eye-contract than to deal with the stares and gestures. I looked down, pretending not to see.

In Dubai I was a photojournalist. I knew a lot of people. They knew me. Here, I’m a temp. I know very few people. No one knows who I am.

So here I am, 10 months into my move back to Canada, trying to figure out who I am again and how this place will leave it's stamp on me. I left Dubai because I needed my life to be different from what it was. Every day I feel like I'm getting a closer to that goal, but it is a slow process and I'm not a patient person.

Choosing a place to finally settle down in Canada has been an evolution.

Our original destination was Calgary. My sister and my delightful niece live there, and with the booming oil economy it seemed like a place that we would be able to relate to and start a life in.

I think two things sounded the death-knell for Calgary once we got there. The first was arriving in late November and the temperature dropping below -20C within the first week. The second was the lack of downtown vibrancy.  After living in Dubai I wanted to enjoy the perks of vibrant North American city living. I wanted nice places to walk and I wanted green space. I don’t want to live in the suburbs and I don’t want to spend all day in my car.

Calgary just wasn’t a good fit for us and that’s something we couldn’t really have known until we got there. So we took stock, decided to cut our losses and headed east to Toronto.

Looking back, those first couple of weeks in Toronto seem like a bad dream. We stayed at my Mom and Dad's house while looking for an apartment.  My parents are lovely, and generously opened their home to us and lent us their cars so that we could get organized. They fed us, encouraged us and were fantastic hosts. 

However, after living away from them for so long, I wasn’t used to their probing questions and unsolicited advice.  I know that’s what family does, but I’m not used to having to explain or justify my day-to-day actions to anyone, so I was defensive, testy  and on edge for most of the time we stayed there (sorry Mom).  When I’m feeling unsure about my whole life and questioning my place in the world I don’t want to have to explain why I did one thing and not another.

I think mostly I was just really, really stressed.  There were so many decisions to make and I haven’t had to make many decisions over the past few years.  My life was very ordered in Dubai and in some ways I was very sheltered. I lived in the same house for four years and paid one lump sum that covered rent, electricity, internet and house-cleaning.  I had been in the same job for more than five years and have been together with my husband for eight. My biggest decision on most days was what to cook for dinner and even then I couldn’t decide sometimes. I was completely out of practice.

And then I arrive in Canada and all of a sudden I am faced with a barrage of decisions to make and they are all pretty important ones. Which part of Canada, which city, downtown or suburbs, what size apartment? I mean, how do you know what your budget is when you don’t have a job?

We had all of our furniture that we shipped from the Middle East arriving and nowhere to put it and were about to sign a lease to spend money we weren’t yet earning.

I learned a very important life lesson in that period: sometimes you have no good choices. There is only making the best of a series of less-than-ideal options. So you try to pick the least bad choice and hope that you haven't buggered up your life completely.

Starting over is hard.  Having done it a few times in my 37 years, it seems to get more difficult each time I go through it.

I’m hoping this time will be the last time. That’s the plan anyhow.

I left the United Arab Emirates in late 2011. I had been in Dubai for nearly 7 years. I started there with a job teaching kindergarten in Abu Dhabi and was very lucky to transition to a job as a photographer for a few small magazines. This in turn led me to getting hired at one of the English daily papers, where I spent 5 years on staff.  Most of what I did was photography, though I was lucky to have some fantastically open-minded senior editors who let me write and become a photo editor as well.

Life in the Emirates was interesting.  You learn to see the world very differently when you move outside of the culture you were raised in. Many of my assumptions about how the world works and how human beings function in society were proved to be completely wrong. People are not the same all over the world. They are very, very different.

Nonetheless, I settled in. I learned how to get around Dubai, made a wide-ish circle of friends and colleagues, and did my best to cope with a way of living that prioritizes very different norms and values than the ones I was raised with. 

Before I knew it years had passed. And though there were distinct advantages to life as an expat in the UAE I was feeling it was time to go. I could go through a long list of positives and negatives to my life in Dubai, but the simplest way to explain my need to leave was that my life there was not what I wanted it to be long term.

Unfortunately, simply picking up and returning to Canada wasn’t as easy as you might expect.

In my years overseas I had met and married a wonderful Irishman. So it was not just one person’s life that needed sorting out but a pair of lives. I suppose we could have simply moved to Canada and dealt with all of his immigration papers once we were in the country. This didn’t seem like a good idea to us. It made more sense to get his residency approved first, that way he would have the right to work immediately, rather than waiting potentially years for his papers to be processed.

It took us 3 months to collect all the paperwork that they asked (including a list of every country he had visited for the past 10 years including exact dates, I mean who records that kind of stuff? There are no passport stamps within the EU and Europeans move around a lot.). Then we had 9 months of waiting to hear if he had been approved.

When they finally did give him his residency we had just 60 days to wrap up our lives in the Emirates and then had to arrive in Canada within 4 months. If we had gone over the allotted time leaving or arriving we were told that they could revoke his residency.  So there was no time to plan or find jobs in Canada before we left. We just had to get up and go. Most people don’t even move cities unless they have a job to go to. We were moving halfway around the world.