How Did I Get Here?
Just a small town girl, living in the American Midwest and wondering… WTF?!
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I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the American Midwest, with my husband, my stepchildren, our dog, two cats and, in a matter of weeks – or days? – our baby.
Three years ago, I lived in Dublin, Ireland, in a house I’d been renting for seven years. I hadn’t yet met my now-husband, whose Tinder bio featured a photograph of him wearing a kilt (“my Dad’s side of the family is Scottish”) paired with a band T-shirt from some heavy metal gig he’d been to.
So. How exactly did I get here?
There is a chronology to all of the above, which, in a way, I find less interesting than the more narrative version, but it may help to share both. So, in short: in late 2018, on one of my semi-annual visits to see my sister Beatrice, her husband Don and their four children, she asked if I would consider applying for a visa and moving over for a year or two.
I had heard of people in my industry – freelance journalism, writing, occasional content creation – applying for, and being granted, O-1 visas, for people with “Extraordinary Ability or Achievement”. Though that description itself might have put me off, the knowledge that fellow freelance journalists, whose CVs looked similar to mine, had been successful in their applications made me feel optimistic about my chances.
My sister was not new to the US; she moved here over a decade ago, where her career in fashion took her first to New York, then to Dallas and now to Fort Wayne, where she works as Chief Creative Officer at Vera Bradley. (You can hear all about her career trajectory on an early episode of our podcast, Not Without My Sister.)
Mind you, it had never occurred to me to apply for a visa when she lived in the Big Apple, or even in Dallas. During those years, I was (relatively) gainfully employed at The Irish Times in Dublin; I was living with an ex or another, imagining an engagement was right around the corner; I was convinced that I would never leave Ireland, that I was too much of a homebody to ever be interested in setting up shop elsewhere.
This time around, when she asked if I’d consider coming over – “just to see if you like it here” – it wasn’t quite that I was immediately enthusiastic about the idea. It was more that I couldn’t think of any reasons not to try. My five-year relationship had recently ended; I had recently signed a contract with Unbound to publish my first book; aside from that, my income was derived almost exclusively from the writing I shared on Patreon. The question wasn’t so much, why would I apply for a visa but more so, why wouldn’t I?
The process itself was laborious. I’ll spare you the details. It cost me around €10,000. It took roughly a year. I spent that year – 2019 – between Ireland and the US, using up the 180 days allowed by the ESTA Visa Waiver Program to test the waters in Fort Wayne.
I joined Tinder (I am tempted to put this further down the list, to suggest that it wasn’t one of the first things I did, but that would be a lie – very early on, I began to think that, if I was going to come and live here, I may as well start the dating process early). I met Brandin. I joined a gym (his gym, for shame).
I drove my sister to work in the mornings and then headed downtown to work out, take myself to brunch, write for a few hours from the window of one of three cafes I favored.
My visa was granted in February of 2020, and so I booked my flights for March 20th. There were rumblings in the air of a virus, spreading quickly across the globe – but, like SARS before it, I just thought, that’ll get sorted before it reaches me.
I packed up my belongings into boxes. I arranged final coffee dates with friends. I enquired about shipping my belongings, packed into boxes, over with me. I booked return flights for May, when I would be home to attend a friend’s wedding and pick up my dog, whose passage back to the US was to cost €1,500. Brandin would pick us both up in Chicago and drive us the four hours to Fort Wayne. Best laid plans.
As it happens, life had slightly other plans – for us all. The Covid-19 pandemic did not, in fact, get “sorted” before it reached us. When Trump announced his travel ban, I brought my flights forward by a week; when I landed in Chicago and switched on my phone, I received a news alert to let me know that, had I chosen to fly a day later, I would not have got out.
My friend’s wedding was postponed. I decided to wait to fly my dog, Coileán, out – but with each passing week, my parents (her new guardians) grew more attached. The vet told my mother that she would be better off staying with them; at 11 years old, with arthritis in one of her hips, the Fort Wayne winters would not serve her well, not to mention the stress of the long-haul flight.
I moved in with my sister and her family and we isolated from everyone else. Brandin and I spoke on the phone each evening; on mild evenings, he came over and sat six feet away from me on the patio, in the bizarre 2020 version of “dating” so many of us became used to.
In July, we swapped over; I moved in with him and his sons (8 and 6) and away from my sister. I social distanced from her and the boys, coming over to spend afternoons on the opposite side of the pool, telling her two-year-old that I was sorry, but he couldn’t sit with me, couldn’t give me hugs, couldn’t have a sip of my Coke.
It may be obvious to the casual observer, but by now I was in love. Not just with Brandin, who is one of the kindest, funniest, tallest men I’ve ever met – albeit with terrible taste in shoes and a tendency to laugh out loud at too many memes, in my opinion – but with Fort Wayne itself, and with the life I was cultivating here.
I tell people that Fort Wayne reminds me a lot of Ireland. There is a lot of green space, a lot of farmland. The clouds are fluffy and there are a lot of churches. The people themselves are friendly. I remember, in New York, walking through the city and making eye contact with precisely no one. In Fort Wayne, people smile at you and say hello. In the supermarket, we dance around one another in a way that I find very familiar. “Excuse me, sorry.” “No, excuse me!” “Oh, sorry.” “No problem!”
Of course, there are differences, too. Indiana is a conservative state. Ireland may have a lot of churches, too, but people here are religious in a different way; it’s less of a cultural thing (“My parents really want us to get married in a church”) and more of an active choice.
When I joined Bumble BFF, in an attempt to meet some women my own age who might share similar interests, I was surprised by the number of them who listed “Church” or “Jesus” among their interests. (I was surprised, too, by the women my age – 35 at the time – who were the mothers of teenagers. My friends at home had only just started to have children, the oldest of whom was five when I left.)
I guess America truly is a foreign country; they do things differently here.
The thing is, had I known I could not go home – not in 2020 and now, thanks to the lingering pandemic and an unexpected but very welcome pregnancy (I had previously been told that conceiving would be a challenge for me, something I believed wholeheartedly), not in 2021 – I don’t think I would have come at all.
I had been willing to give it a go, but when I boarded that flight last March, it was with the knowledge that I would be home in May, and again, I hoped, in September. I’d told myself that I could go home whenever I chose to, that this move did not need to be permanent, that the three-year term of my visa was merely a suggestion, not a prescription.
In a way, this inability to go “home” was the one thing that allowed me to start thinking of this, the Midwest, as a home, of sorts, too. I haven’t been homesick because there has been no opportunity for it. What’s the point in crying over something I am absolutely powerless to do anything about? I have tried to make the most of things.
And, mostly, I have. I have allowed myself to fall in love with a man, with his children, with the dog we adopted and the home we bought together. I have fallen further in love with my nephews, to have a relationship with each of them that would never have been possible, had I stayed thousands of miles away.
I have started to say “trash” instead of “rubbish” and “sidewalk” instead of “path”, mostly because I hate having to explain myself, almost as much as I hate having to talk about how beautiful Ireland is, to people who have always – always – wanted to visit.
In a way, I got here by accident. And in another way, it feels like it was absolutely by design. I’m just not sure whose.
I completely get this, I'm Irish living in Austin Texas and I too used those words trash etc now purely so I don't have to explain myself haha...we moved 3 years ago and I think we never would have if we knew the pandemic was coming...its been 2 years since I've seen family and been back in Ireland
I love a good emigration story, especially since I had a similar journey but in reverse.