Last week I was reminded that it was five years ago that Jude and I packed up everything we owned into eight suitcases and moved to Vancouver. We had just got married 14 days before and we were getting ready for the Seattle edition of our wedding in a few weeks.
I knew being with Jude meant we would be moving around. When we met on OK Cupid two years before he was very open about his nomadic lifestyle. When I first got his number rather than using his name he was listed simply as ’Nomad’ in my phone, (online dating is tough, you got to have some fun when you’re telling your girlfriends about the random guys you meet).
As we started dating and getting more serious, I would tell my friends that he was nomadic by nature, it was just who he was as a person and not just a phase he was in. The more we talked about traveling and the places we wanted to live I began to think maybe it was in my nature too. I had already travelled a lot and lived in South Korea to teach English, but I had never given serious thought about living in other cities or countries as a lifestyle until then.
What would it mean to pack up your life and move to a different country? In Korea I loved the idea that this was just my life now, I lived in a studio apartment, I had a job, a gym membership, and local restaurants I would go to. On weekends my friends and I would play tourist, but during the week this was just my life.
Our move to Vancouver in 2015 was on a whim, we had sublet an apartment for a few months, some money saved up and it was a great excuse to take my West Coast husband back to the mountains. We just knew we needed to shake things up. It was also really the first time I tested out the idea of being ’Nomadic’.
As we talk about our travels and adventures please don’t think for a second that it wasn’t incredibly hard. Our move to the west coast meant we had to re-home my cats which I had had for five years, we had to sell many of our possessions and downsize in a way that we only took things that would fit in our suitcases. It’s a type of uncomfortable you that makes you question why you want this life. I cried a lot, sometimes tears of what am I doing, but mainly tears of processing what letting go of these possessions meant to me (more on that later).
Everyone has their ideal life which comes with its own adventures and struggles, ‘settling down’ or ‘moving around’ are not better or worse it’s just a different life, and this is ours.