A little overdue, but being the last day of the first month of 2023, let’s just agree to call it fashionably late 😉.

2022 was the first full year that I spent abroad, away from home, and what a year it has been.

When I was younger, I always dreamed of moving abroad, allured by the mysteries and secrets nestled in the streets and corners of cities foriegn to me. Somehow as I got older, that dream became a little less enticing, I settled into the daily 9-5 hustle, making sensible (which somehow translates to financial) life decisions, and traded my time modestly. This isn’t to say I wasn’t happy, it’s simply that the dreams I had as a child remained just that, the whims of a younger me, and I grew comfortable with the perceived borders and capabilities that I had.

Well, with the COVID pandemic came a complete shattering of the aforementioned routine, and allowed me to leap beyond what I thought was possible. I had been on the ‘hamster wheel’ of progress ever since finishing high-school, and while I had endured bumps and hurdles along the way, at the age of 24 I had managed to complete my Bachelor of Science degree, was a semester in to my Honours year in Psychology (which is roughly 4/5ths the way to becoming a licensed psychologist), all whilst pursuing and growing my career in tech and software.

Truth be told, I was terrified to hop off that hamster wheel, but with the pandemic restrictions having no foreseeable end at the time, I put what felt like my entire life on hold, bought a one-way ticket to the US, and made my way to New York City, with as much of my life I could bundle into two suitcases.

Living semi-nomadically in the beginning, there were so many things that I learned I had always taken for granted. Let’s talk laundry for a second! Firstly, I grew up being spoiled and never did my own laundry (thank you Mum). After moving into my own apartment at 21, I had to do my own laundry, which felt like a chore, albeit I didn’t know at the time that even this was luxury. Moving to NYC, I had no laundry in my place, so I now had to pencil an hour or two to bag all of my clothes, schlep down the street to coin laundromats, and wash them there, feeding the machines with quarters, moving them from washer to dryer, watching time pass by.

Australia, you have no idea how good you have it when it comes to insurance. Health insurance? Car insurance? Let’s talk about it. In my second month here, I was involved in a car accident in New Jersey, after having just watched the new James Bond movie, ‘No Time to Die’. Talk about an action-packed evening!

Now, despite the fact I was hit while parked on the side of the road outside of a 7-Eleven as my friend grabbed us some slurpees, and therefore completely not at fault, New Jersey is what’s known as a ‘no-fault state’, where essentially fault doesn’t matter, and you are always responsible for claiming expenses with your own insurance company, paying the deductible, co-pay for any treatment, etc. Want to claim your expenses back? You have to sue the other driver!

Shopping for health insurance was another chore. Paragraphs upon paragraphs of policy detail, navigating the various different levels of coverage, debating how much I valued my life (literally). Would I be covered in other states? How much did I want my deductible to be? Co-pay? Living in Australia, this was something I never had to think about, my Medicare number had been with my doctor for as long as I had known, I could walk into any pharmacy with my prescription and expect to pay a fairly modest price for routine medicines like antibiotics and painkillers. Here in the US, I received a $500 bill for an antibiotic cream. Asthma inhaler? $70. Oh, and you have to make sure the pharmacy you visit is an ‘in-network’ one, one that your insurance will accept, and therefore subsidised to somewhat acceptable prices.

Want to be able to hotspot from your phone? Most often an extra option on your phone plan, with different data and speed allowances. Flying to another city? Forget checked luggage, or a standard sized carry-on, your basic ticket will likely be backpack only, unless of course you have some status with the airline.

Now by this point I know you may be thinking, ‘well that doesn’t seem so exciting’, and you are absolutely right. Making a place home is difficult and exhausting, and if you haven’t experienced the above yourself, it’s likely that you don’t have to look far to find someone in your family who did this work for you. In my case, it was my parents, who had moved to Australia from Syria/US and China respectively, and without the internet, a smartphone, or Google at their fingertips, managed to settle into their cities, establish a life for themselves (and then together), and paved the way for me to have an easier path for my own life and opportunities.

So what did I learn in 2022? I learned about how blessed and fortunate I already was. I didn’t have a particularly luxurious or lavish life growing up in Melbourne, nevertheless for many of us growing up in these first world countries, we were given a platform from which we are often wishing and dreaming for more, which in my case is exactly what my parents fought so hard to build, yet from that same platform, we often don’t have an awareness of how blessed and fortunate we already are. The adage ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ comes to mind.

2022 was filled with adventure and experiences, its own ups and downs. I laughed, I cried, I loved, I grieved, I discovered, I healed, and I grew. I realise I’m beginning to sound like one of those ‘live laugh love’ signs, so what best way to encapsulate it all? I’ll just say I lived. And it was the best year of my life.

With that, I send my love and gratitude to everybody who was with me in that journey. Let’s keep that ball rolling, and here’s to 2023 🥂.

Michael