I’m not sure if I mentioned in a previous post how it came to be that I became trans-located from the UK across the pond into the US.
It started fairly easily… I wanted to live in the US!
The previous five or so years, I had become quite enamored with the American culture, I had studied American history in high school as an optional course as a change from science and it was fascinating. I had become a huge fan of football* thanks in part to happenstance and to an obsession with playing Madden with my younger brother.
Just for a bit of personal history, the first game I ever saw was Super Bowl XLI by pure chance. I was bored at home on a cold February night and randomly flipped onto the opening ceremony of the Super Bowl on C4. I watched the whole thing intently; the half time show with Prince, the endless Rex Grossman bumbling, and that was where my love started. I wanted to know more… watch more videos, play more games.
For whatever reason, my brother also started to love football around the same time, a few years of Madden and following the NFL network later, and I was a mega fan. There is no off season to me. I watch the draft. I watch the scouting combine. I don’t just blindly follow the Giants either because that was the first place I lived when I moved to America. I am a huge Giants fan, but I can talk with any fan about any team. Although I’d rather not talk to certain team fans…
The point is that I have grown closer and closer to the US culture for several years before I left. My love of football was just part of that…
In the meantime I was moving into the final year of a Ph.D. program in chemistry and wondering what I would do afterward. Most people look for a Post-Doc but I was far more interested in getting out of the lab and moving into a career.
Then one day someone, knowing how much I love America, I was asked why I don’t move there…
It seemed obvious but my first thoughts were..
“How can I do that?!”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“It sounds expensive.”
“I don’t know anyone there.”
But then I realized…
These were just excuses! I loved the idea of moving to the country that I loved, albeit in theory at this point. Sure, I’d visited a few times but Hawaii, Florida and New York City hardly seem like the real America. I didn’t know what it would really be like.
So the next day I started looking into how I could get to America…
One solution was to do a Post-Doc… not my first choice. but by far the easiest way to get a Visa and a Post-Doc at Princeton would get my foot in the American door, and it would be great for my CV.
I began planning, found a flight, a place to stay, got my visa, and prepared. It didn’t really dawn on me that I was really leaving my whole life behind until I was on the plane. My life was literally packed into two suitcases and I could barely breathe with anxiety and the worst heartburn of my life.
I landed into JFK airport that evening and made the huge mistake of deciding to stay in a cheap hotel in Queens before moving on to Princeton the next day. An even bigger mistake was foregoing the taxi service from JFK, and instead opting for the AirTrain to Jamaica Station followed by a five block walk… at night. This whole plan had me wondering if I’d made a HUGE mistake by coming here at all… and if I would even live to regret it.
The next day, I headed to Princeton, lugging two packed suitcases through the busy New York City and the architectural black hole that is Pennsylvania Station. I figured, how hard could it be to change trains from the Long Island Railroad to the NJ Transit… Boy was I naive!
Finally I made it to Princeton, this time opting to take a taxi to the place I’d call home for the next month, a rental house just North of the University. The family I was renting a room from was welcoming, but all I really wanted to do was decompress, so I went for a walk before even packing away my clothes.
The first time I saw Princeton town, my heartburn and anxiety evaporated immediately.
I felt like I was home, finally…
And I’ve felt like that ever since.
True, I’ve since moved to Pittsburgh, which I much prefer to Princeton, but I knew for the first time that I was on the right track. America was my home, and I knew it.
So if you’ve read this far, congratulations! I don’t pretend that my story is exciting, or even interesting, but it is unique to me and it does hold a lesson.
You can be one of those people who just talks about “one day I’m going to do this”, or “I want to do this”. The word “but” usually completes the second part of those sentences. I used to do it too.
“I want to live in America, but…”
Until someone I trusted asked me why don’t I? I really didn’t think it was real.
It doesn’t matter what your dream is. Talk is cheap, as they say, not in money though, it’s cheap in time and effort. Achieving any dream, however small, requires overcoming some barrier to happiness.
I realized while writing this story that this barrier is much like the barrier towards a chemical reaction. It’s the reason why paper dreams of bursting into flames, but instead it just sits there, as a piece of paper, until it catches a spark. That spark helps the paper overcome the reaction barrier and the paper burns just as it always wanted to.
Let me explain what I mean using the diagram…
In Chemistry reactions lower energy just means something is more stable but if you trace the energy pathway from Y to X there is a high energy peak between the two. Much like life, there is always an uphill struggle if you want to make a life change to a happier state.
But notice the red line! That looks MUCH easier, I want to take the easy path to happiness!
Well you can, but that requires a catalyst. A catalyst makes that effort less and the change easier. My catalyst was my friend who basically sat me down and told me to get my head out of my ass and start doing something toward my goal or stop talking about it!
My goal was to live in America, my barrier was the torturous journey, expenses and effort of finding a job in another country, and my catalyst was a trusted (albeit abrasive) friend… and now I’m at point X and looking for my next low energy state!
So stop reading this and figure out what you want and start working toward it!
And most importantly, find your catalyst…
*For the purposes of this and ALL future posts, ‘football’ refers to American football! If I mean ‘soccer’ I will say soccer, which I probably won’t because it sucks and is boring. Very few things annoy me more than being questioned every time I say football as to whether I in fact mean ‘American football’ as if it is that surprising that a British person would prefer football to soccer. Just for the record, it is Americans who decided to use the same bloody word for a completely different, all be it superior sport, and thus create the confusion.
