At 6.30am last Sunday I was sitting on a leather sofa in an emergency vet in North Austin, rain hammering the car park outside, with my six-year-old cavapoo, Bruno, shaking and whining at my feet. Restless, anxious and very clearly in pain; my poor thing. A couple of hours later, I had a new word in my vocabulary; pancreatitis.
This was not the weekend I had initially planned. Saturday was meant to be ACL, the music festival in Austin that pulls in hundreds of thousands of people across its 2 weekends. Sunday was brunch at a cute restaurant, Josephine House and the new film with Robert Pattinson, Primetime. Instead the sky opened, the plans dissolved and I spent my day stretched on my bed next to a dog who couldn’t settle, watching the rain and feeling drained.
Across the waiting room, a woman stormed into the emergency vet clinic clutching her cat, crying quietly into its fur. A couple of hours later I watched her walk out carrying an empty pillow bed, eyes fixed on the floor so nobody could catch them. I immediately looked down at my own very poorly but very much alive dog and felt something I can only describe as guilty gratitude.
If this year has taught me anything, it’s that a plan is only ever a first draft, and life has only the final word with the red pen in hand.
The longest move
Since May, home has been Austin, Texas. Before that, it was London for ten years, and before that Athens, Greece, where I grew up and went to university with a six-month detour to Rennes, France for my Erasmus. I came to the UK in 2015 for my MSc in International Business at Warwick University and stayed in London, building a life brick by brick; friends, jobs, then clients, routines, a favourite {everything, insert restaurant, theatre, hobby}. Then, my partner and I took a gamble, packed up the dog and some boxes (he will say too many!) and crossed an ocean.
I’ve moved countries before, but never continents. As a European arriving in Britain, I didn’t need a visa (pre-Brexit era) and I took that entirely for granted until I suddenly needed one. Getting here took more time, tears and paperwork than I care to admit. Dates slipped, houses fell through or looked nothing like the photos on their listings, deadlines arrived and left without us, leaving us in a limbo of wanting to make new plans but couldn’t, saying goodbyes but not really. If you’ve been or are going through a similar situation now, I see you and I’d buy you a coffee if I could.
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3 things that kept me sane
Not setting benchmarks and expectations
The first piece of advice came from my therapist in one of our sessions. I have talked before about how much therapy has altered the chemistry of my brain and helped me get out of burnout and fulfil my professional aspirations.
So before the move, I’d lie awake at night catastrophising about what I’d miss, what I’d giving up, how lonely and difficult it would be to start again. Two short visits in Austin before moving in gave me a handful of data points & references, and my brain was using them to paint an entire, mostly gloomy, picture. So, my therapist and I tried something new: I stopped predicting. I told myself, and I meant it, that I had no idea what life in Austin would be like. It was a blank canvas, and I didn’t have enough colours to paint it yet. Setting no expectations, to my surprise, worked. With nothing to compare against, I stopped measuring Austin against London or Athens or Rennes and started meeting it on its own terms.
Seeing your life as chapters of your own book
The second concept I came up with while breaking the news to my mum, who is anxious, sensitive and quite reasonably, not thrilled about her daughter moving even further away. If you know anything about Mediterranean culture, families stick together and mothers never stop worrying or complaining about how little time they spent with their children, irrespective of their age. I told her that I see my life as a book with chapters rather than one long sentence. I’m less of plant that puts down roots and never leave its soil, more of a bird that migrates with the seasons, curious about new land and perfectly capable of making a home there. If a chapter stops working for me, I can turn the page. I decide the length of each chapter and the next one will have a different title, and it’ll be written with all lessons, struggles, epiphanies, failures, wins of the last. She didn’t like or appreciate the analogy but she accepted it.
Control the controllable, leave the rest
The third is the one I’m leaning on hardest this weekend. When our moving date kept slipping through our fingers and I was quietly unravelling, my therapist asked me to sort everything in 2 piles: what I could control and what I couldn’t. The visa decision wasn’t mine; how prepared I was for the interview, and whether every document was in order, was. We only learnt our moving date a month or two beforehand and booked flights almost at the last minute, but I could still pack, sell the furniture, give away the clothes, and say proper goodbyes to my friends, my ex-colleagues, my clients, my routines, my London.
I couldn’t control the storm, or my dog’s pancreas, or what happened to the woman with the cat. I could control how quickly we went to the vet and how grateful I chose to be for a rained-off Sunday with a small, warm dog breathing next to me. Five months in, that’s the closest that I have to a philosophy.
Things that have surprised a Greek-Armenian-Brit in Texas (so far)
Everyone is a Longhorns fan, it’s a college(!) football team.
YouTube TV offers more channels than any European mind is equipped to handle.
The number of billboards for injury lawyers tells something about Texan drivers that I’d rather not dwell on.
On a Texas highway, a small car is a life decision rather than a personal style choice.
Self-driving cars are simply part of the traffic; nobody looks twice.
Cowboy boots in 35°C/ 95°F heat. That isn’t fashion, it’s commitment.
Miles, pounds, Fahrenheit, square feet. All unit of measurement is different, so I do mental maths all day.
Portions are enormous and the food is excellent. Both things can be true and that’s AMAZING.
HEB Central Market is one of the best supermarkets I’ve ever set foot in, and London had thoroughly spoilt me.
Second-hand & vintage shops are everywhere and they are genuinely so good. Resale isn’t a trend here, it’s part of this city’s DNA.
Strangers start conversations in queues, walks, elevators, all the time.
Everyone works in tech, wellness or real estate. There is no fourth option
After work, everyone is running, playing pickleball, kayaking in the Colorado River, or doing something to move their body. Then a cold plunge and a sauna. This is not optional.
Tacos aren’t a meal but a routine.
Kitchens come without extractor fans, and nobody can tell me why.
Wardrobes can be rooms, sometimes bigger than the rooms themselves
Nobody mentioned the humidity.
Strangers compliment you DAILY.
Wealth is quiet here, the way people dress or what cars they drive tell you nothing
If you think you saw an insect, you probably did.
Deer, rabbits, squirrels, frogs turn up in the city.
Music is EVERYWHERE: big stages, concerts, tiny venues, even the airport.