No, I have not given up on the blog! And I have no intentions of doing so. But since I moved on May 1, Canada has very quickly become a different kind of place for me. See, visiting a place and moving there are two completely different things.
I was thinking about this the other day on a commute to my new job, which is located in beautiful Hamilton, Ontario.
I feel good...almost too good. Maybe it's because the preceding months have felt...not so good. Has it only been three months? Three months since I moved here? Well yes, but things have seemed off since long before that...
It all seems to blend together. As I fight traffic on the Red Hill Valley Parkway, I look in the rear view mirror, which is covered in smudges from adjusting it frantically over the past several weeks of hectic driving through Toronto. Gah. I used to love driving around. Now it's a chore. Now I want to be out taking in the scenery myself. Beyond the smudges, is my hairline receding? I can't tell, I never got my new eyeglass prescription filled before I moved. Didn't have the time. New eyeglass prescription? Yeah, I need one every year. Boy, I am old. Three months. Ha! I've been doing this for five years, more like. But now I'm on my way to work on a rainy Monday. My inner monologue is full of mundane complaints, as it seems to always have been, but these days, I don't really seem all that moved by them. I don't get fired up about things as much anymore. Rather, there's an odd sort of calmness and quiet I feel. It seems to always be there now, all the time. What--what the hell is it?
Reader, you have just had your proverbial toe dipped into the deep, steep currents that are the lucid thoughts of an immigrant. One who has recently discovered what it means to be happy.
The long and winding road
- Happiness is not a destination. I believe it's not even really a journey. It's a mindset, almost like a sort of emotional homeostasis. And it's shaped by a lot of things: how you act, how you react, the places you put yourself in and the people you surround yourself with. But it's also not something that should require a bunch of mental gymnastics to arrive at.
- Like all other things in life, happiness comes at a cost. It is a hard truth that some things and some people just hold you away from happiness, whether they mean to or not. And a lot of the things you think make you happy, you should really take stock of once in awhile to make sure they really do. A lot of my "comforts" I have really come to find out were crutches, and it is only at the expense of a lot of these things that I have truly been able to find clarity.
- Happiness is not situational. Life has ups and downs. And for a long time, I considered the string of downs I was having as evidence that I was not and should not have been happy. Not that long ago, I thought that the solution to all my problems was to move to another country; that just by leaving I would be happy. But I very quickly realized that every place has its problems. And what's more, some of your old problems will follow you wherever you go. Alas, I still arrived at happiness anyway. How can this be? We'll talk more about this in a minute, but I think the main reason I arrived at happiness is simply because I realized that
- Happiness is real. For years, I truly wasn't sure that it was. People who do not have a happiness problem will not understand this uncertainty. They immediately point to all the things you have: I had a lovely wife, good friends (as good can get in your 20s I suppose), a good job, a roof over my head. But see, for people who have a happiness problem, all of these things take a backseat in your mind to the one thing you don't have, which is, you know, the happiness.
And so, with that, in hopes this will reach anybody out there who is struggling with a long distance relationship or a move to a new place like I was for a long time, or even if you aren't, I just thought I would share some of the ups and downs on this very long and winding road to happiness I have taken.
*I am not a doctor and this is not intended to be medical advice.
The downs
It gets so exhausting telling Sydney and I's story over and over again, mostly because the person never has any actual interest. They're just confused by it, or want to gawk at it. In this case, it was both. And so, here I go, explaining to the bureaucrat how we met, where we met, when we met, why we met, all the dates: When did we get engaged? Married? When did we file the paperwork? When did we get approved? Why did you do this now instead of then? Why didn't you do this sooner? Where were you on this date and time? How long were you together before you got married? And where was she on such and such date? And how long did you stay there on X occasion?
God, the questions never end. But the one question. Oh brother do I hate this question. It drives me absolutely bonkers. They may ask it genuinely, but I don't care. It's still wrong to ask it. It is the dreaded thing that everybody in a long distance relationship DESPISES hearing to the point where it will make you grip the nearest thing to your hand into a pulp with anger. Six words that send me into utter contempt:
"Why can't she just come here?"
...is what I would have said, but fortunately, all of these responses come colliding together in my head before they can come out in any sort of order.
Instead, I gave some B.S. answer about how there were a lot of personal reasons, which was technically true, and probably as much as this person cared about, but doesn't nearly scratch the surface of the real reasons, most of which I plan to flesh out over time on this blog.
Sometimes, I explain my anger with the "Why can't she just come here?" question to a friend or family member, and their response will be:
"You don't owe anybody an explanation for anything. Just don't tell them anything."
I don't necessarily blame them, because for every ignorant counter-argument I hear (universal healthcare is socialism), there's also a very legitimate counter-argument (home ownership in Canada will most likely never be possible in our lifetimes). For so long, I wondered, "Is my reason for leaving really worth it? Or are these just things I tell myself so I can sleep at night?"
Well, if it was the latter, it wasn't working. There were many sleepless nights. When Sydney and I first started dating, the question of "who is moving where" began immediately looming over our heads. Compounded by being in my senior year of college (year 4 of university), working three jobs, and also trying to be a grown-up learning how to take care of myself and manage my personal relationships, I was feeling pretty down, even on the good days. Driving to Ottawa most weekends to see Sydney served as some small escapism, but the reality is that "most weekends" is not enough to do relationship-building.
I knew this and she knew this. Most other people knew this, too, which is why they were quick to dismiss our relationship as being not real, or not real "enough" to meet their standards for what a relationship should be. You know, it's funny--people like to act like they know everything, but they don't seem to have any wisdom to impart to you when you need it. People always wanted to tell me my relationship wasn't real, or wasn't healthy, or wasn't going to last, but they never seemed to have any suggestions to fix it. "Well I just wouldn't stay with a person that far away." Well, okay, sure, but here's the problem: Sydney was (and is) an amazing person; a different kind of person than any I had ever met before--bright and bubbly, tender and genuine, witty, thoughtful, you know, all the things that you look for in a person and a lot of things I wasn't--just pleasant surprises. I could go on, but the point is, leaving was never really an option. We were inseparable from the moment we met, whether or not anybody else believed it, or wanted to believe it.
Which is why, of course, our relationship never wavered despite all the questions and the naysayers. One night in December, 2019, we had been together a little over a year, and she finally asked me out loud:
"So are you going to move here?"
But Tyler, why would you say no?
Well, because not that long ago, I made decisions primarily out of fear. When you're down, you tend to do that.
The ups
When I was a kid, I looked up a lot to my Uncle Chuck, an accomplished Air Force veteran, professor and writer. He had conducted a lot of genealogical research on our family, and had found out we were descendants of the Billingtons, a notoriously rowdy English family known for wreaking havoc on the Mayflower and in Plymouth Colony in the seventeenth century. Maybe or maybe not incidentally, the lakeshore I grew up on outside of Syracuse was named Billington Bay. And just like that, from this story and many others like it, I had this divine curiosity instilled in me, and began a fascination with how people end up where they are, why they are born where they are and why at their moment in time. I had convinced myself that New York, beautiful and historic, the home of the Haudenosaunee, and an important place at many junctures in the American story, and a place of geographic importance to the Founding Fathers, was somehow sacred. And if it was sacred, so, too, then, must have been myself and the people I knew.
This is why, when I was in high school, I ran (what I thought at the time was) a tenacious bid to be our class president, and I am thankful that I won. Everybody always told me I should go into politics. Though the idea terrified me, I thought then was as good a time as any to dip my toes into "politics" and see what it was all about.
I didn't like what I saw. Even in our tiny, sleepy little high school, even after a partisan-less campaign, there was still infighting, bureaucracy, all the things I was worried would happen. Side-eyes and whispers from kids and parents and teachers who thought I was doing a hack-job "in office." Looking back, I laugh at how seriously people took the charade of "class presidency." I was a figurehead who was allowed to plan fundraisers and design t-shirts, and both of those went disastrously. I discovered two things for the first time: you can't please everyone, and you can't make someone care about something. I tried like hell for those two years to get other kids to raise funds for our class trip, and my efforts were completely futile. Even for those who tried, people in the community, our community, the community I was destined to be in, didn't really seem to care that we were there or what we were doing. And then, after graduation, as so many cohorts often do, most of the people I was raised with just sort of drifted away and out of my life.
Not to worry, for now I was in college! Studying what? History and education, of course! I had a responsibility to go back to the community and raise the next generation of Syracusans. And, while my college years are more than enough for its own blog post, one thing I will mention here that I will always remember is the first week of classes, one of our professors was taking the class down the hall to one of the computer labs, and he turned around and looked at me and five other boys who looked just like me, and he said, "So I know you're all studying history and education. But what are you really going to do?" We all looked at him confused. "Every straight white male in America goes to college to become a social studies teacher at their old high school in their hometown. But they can't hire all of you, and they're not going to. So most of you need to decide: what are you really going to do?"
Those words haunted me for the longest time. Something I had seen as the most noble, sensical career for myself had just been shot down like a soda can off a stump. I wasn't just some lunk who wanted to work at my old high school to coach football, I really cared! But this didn't seem to matter, and his words really foreshadowed the months and years that followed. It was the lowest time in my life. I spent my time around professors, who mostly didn't care about our learning or success as much as they did writing and researching their own interests, and around other students, who seemed only to care about being friends from one fleeting moment to the next, before going back to wherever it was they were from. If my "community" was apathetic before, well now it didn't really seem to exist at all. I felt like the place that raised me and the generations before me, the place I was always destined to be, had turned its back on me.
I thought back to all the people I admired throughout my life. What would they do if they were me? I thought back to my Uncle Chuck, who knew so much about our place and family. What did he do with his life? Well, as I found out after his passing, he apparently packed up a truck and left New York the day he turned 18, and never came back. Hmm.
As you may have read about on my About Me page, I tried to cope during this time by traveling a lot, to see old friends or new things. I always seemed to be looking for something, and at the time I was never really sure what, but I realize now that it was so simple: people who wanted me there. Belonging. Community.
I went all around the country during that time, and I never really found those things. Until I met Sydney. And when you find the person who wants you to be there, it doesn't matter where "there" is.
And so, even after all the hardships we endured afterward, like having our relationship invalidated by every other passerby, being inundated with questions, always having to prove ourselves to everybody, being separated due to the Covid border closure, the fact that Syd was still there after all of it was more than enough reason for me to stop living in fear. For the first time, I was brave. I didn't want to let my emotions cloud my judgment anymore. The logical thing to do, for my sanity, for my quality of life, was to leave, even if it meant confusing people, upsetting people, answering more uncomfortable questions, filling out a ton of paperwork, spending thousands of dollars, losing a job I loved, not being able to go out to eat at my favorite restaurants anymore. The place I was from outgrew me, and now it was time for me to outgrow it. Happiness has a cost. Immigration is going to be something that changes my whole life. There are always going to be problems, There are always going to be challenges. Some things will easier than they were before, but some will undoubtedly be harder. Happiness is not situational. Do I even know what I'm getting myself into? Syd will be graduating from the University of Ottawa this year, where will she even be? I don't know, and I don't care, because wherever she is, I am. I've never left my hometown and I need new experiences. Happiness is not a destination. Why am I doing this? Why can't she just come here??? Because I don't WANT her to, that's why. Because of all the reasons I already know of and a million more. Because at the end of the day, I've been to the other side and I've been welcomed, in a way that I never was anywhere else. Almost like Canada can be mine for the taking. Nobody there is questioning me or telling me who or what I can be. There, it's just me and her and quiet and calmness. Happiness. Is. Real.
The other side
Just as I thought the place I grew up was everything, Americans are often raised to believe, though in a more stubborn and secular way, that America is all that matters. The idea that somebody could exist somewhere else is almost mind-boggling. And someone choosing to exist somewhere else? I can see the 404 errors in people's eyes whenever I speak it. And so, that's where you get a lot of "don't you all live in igloos" jokes, whereas the more cultured types seem to exist on the fringes. Expats, such a dirty word. I think they made it such an awful-sounding word on purpose, so that the people who defined themselves by it felt more shame. And yet, notably, the definition of "expat" is somebody who is just living outside the country for now, with an implied intent to come back, because it's simply inconceivable that anybody would leave America and not come back.
Not to say that I will never come back, because we do not know what the future holds. But I decidedly use the term "immigrant" to describe myself. Though also a dirty word, I've tried to reclaim it, because "immigrant" is somebody who just leaves, for a better life. No "for now" attached.
And I'm glad I did, because believe it or not, a good life is possible outside of America. I've lost some weight since I've been here, and I credit most of that to the food being cleaner. My medical debt? Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. I go to the mall all the time, or go on a walk through the city at night, and I don't fear for my safety whatsoever. I go to the store and I don't feel overwhelmed by choices (people will have a hard time with this one. But seriously, when I used to go grocery shopping at Wegmans, I literally always left with a headache). I don't feel the pretension and performance from people I used to feel, of everybody trying to look good and put on a brave face all the time. Not to say that everybody here is nice, but on the whole, it's nicer.
I shied away from coming out and saying this for the three months I've been here, because it's really not meant to be gloating, as many Americans I know will take it to be. But at the end of the day, I don't care how it makes people feel or not feel anymore. I just need to share that I am, truly, happy.
Final thoughts
Have you ever left your hometown? What did people think and how did that affect your decision? Were you happy with your decision?