All That You Can't Leave Behind

This post is dedicated to Bono because of my shameless use of his lyrics in this post.

I haven't written in awhile, and a lot has happened in the past couple of months. The job has gotten a lot better. It's gotten really busy for me at work, I get a buzz from what I'm doing, and I think I can do a lot with this job. Thing is, I'm wavering on Dublin as a whole. It's no secret that I'm not in love with the place, even though I have found some compelling elements about it. To quote a former boss, "I'm just not jazzed about it" (the city this time, not the job).

For a while I started to think that I would stay here a couple more years. As the visit from my parents approached, I even thought that I was crazy to go home at Christmas. I mean, what was I thinking? I hate Christmas. It's the worst time of year to go. There are so many things that I want to do and see over those two weeks and I won't be able to do half of them because of the holidays. Friends will be off seeing their own families, and the shops will be crazy, so shopping will suck. I also need to schedule dental, optometrist and hair appointments, renew my driver's license and get a new health card. That's not easy to do over the holidays either. I should have arranged to go somewhere warm and non-Christian over the holidays and visited Canada in October instead.

Now, part of me wishes that I was coming home for good over Christmas. I don't know when this changed for me. It seems like it was overnight. I know part of it was when the weather changed, and all of a sudden it was very cold out every day. I have even started wearing a scarf. It gets dark really early here and winter is generally damp and dreary. I now leave for work and come home in the dark, and we haven't even changed the clocks back yet.

I also know that another part of it was when a friend came to visit a couple of weeks ago. It's always great having visitors from home. Even though everyone here speaks English (though that might be debatable), only those from home really speak your language. The friend that visited was more a friend of my old flatmate than my friend, but it turned out that we got on like wildfire and it's safe to say that I have made a new friend out of the visit.

I have been really homesick this past week, the first time I've been this homesick since the spring. I realized that my friends are starting to drift. I've been warned that this happens around the nine-month mark. A lot of people have difficulty keeping up correspondence, and I'm as guilty as anyone. If you want to get a letter, you have to write one, and I've been awful this year.

However, the biggest thing that I've been homesick about is that I have no support system over here. It's something that I think I always took for granted because my family is just so solid. Many of my friendships were slow to develop, and as a result, my social support network snuck up on me. Now that I don't have that support of friendship locally, and it is something that I really needed this past week, I realise just how important it is, and how much it means to me.

Question is, am I ready to go home? The move back home would be really difficult. I wouldn't have a job and since I've only been at my latest job for 2.5 months, and temped the rest of the time I was here, I don't have a lot to show on my CV. If I could stick it out for a year, I would be doing a lot better career-wise. If I could stick it out two years, I would be laughing. I don't know if I want to though. I'm not sure being without my friends and family would be worth it in the long run.

In the immortal words of Bono, "you're on the road, but you've got no destination…", or maybe it's better to say, "you got stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it". At what point is it a zen moment of not knowing if you’re staying or leaving, and not really caring either way, and at what point is it just inertia?

Can you tell I was listening to U2 while writing this?