Starting over is hard

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.