Top Secret No More

The Top Secret Plans were, and maybe still are, to move to London next year. I have been thinking about this for a long time.

I have been wanting to live abroad since I was in college. I didn’t do a study abroad program for several of reasons, some having to do with being a Teen Evangelist, some having to do with a boy I liked at the time, and all having to do with being a pretty pathetic puppy with no mind of her own. I can still hardly think about the choices I made ten years ago without tearing up. After I graduated from social work school I learned about an opportunity to go to England and work as a social worker there; they had then and have now a huge shortage of social workers and several agencies were (and are) recruiting new graduates from overseas. I decided to take the job I had before this one when it was offered to me about a week after I got in touch with an international recruiter because I had been unemployed for what seemed like a long time and I was not ready to just pick up and leave immediately when I had the option of safety and security offered to me. I spent some time regretting that for a while but not as much as you might think because I felt pretty sure that I was going to be able to travel more extensively at some unidentified point in the future with the person I was dating at the time. I was also considering joining the Peace Corps eventually.

A couple of years passed slowly and quickly at the same time, the way they do, and I kept the idea of living and working and traveling abroad at a low simmer on the back burner. I am leery of even mentioning anything having to do with the relationship I was in at the time, but as things got more and more difficult I began to think again more seriously about what else I could do with my life beside wait around for someone who didn’t love me to tell me he didn’t want to marry me. I looked into going to London again and realized, to my active dismay and disappointment, that the working holidaymaker scheme under which I’d been eligible to go the year after I graduated was closed to me since I’d turned 28. I began instead to sublimate the desire to travel by starting to plan a little trip to France and Italy in the spring of 2004. My very safe and stable and low-level miserable life changed immensely when I got back and part of how I dealt with all those changes was to think again about moving abroad. Those of you who have been reading a while or who know me in real life know that I was so sad and crazy for what felt like so long. My mind wouldn’t let me rest, wouldn’t let me be still, and so I figured I should put all the hectic energy of grief into something, and what I decided to put it into was the scheme of finally doing this thing I’d been wanting to do for ten years, now that I had (and have) no one to answer to, no one to compromise with. It’s all Chiara, all the time.

What I learned, through lots of internet research and my trip to London last December, where I actually met with some of these recruitment agency people, was that they still need social workers in the UK and that I could still go, still do it, on two very important conditions. One was that I had to get registered as a social worker through the auspices of the General Care Social Council. This required, seriously, an application that was more difficult than those I did for grad school. They wanted all sorts of documents and forms and a huge check (in pounds sterling, of course) and they wanted stuff like thank you notes from former clients, which THANK HEAVEN I HAD. I can’t imagine having had to do that and not working down the street from the School of Social Work and still having access to the client files at the low-income mental health clinic at which I used to volunteer. Man. Anyway, I got that in around March, and in June I was accepted. My registration is good for the next three years. This was really important because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to work as a social worker over there and I thought I may as well make that damn degree count for something.

The second thing I needed was an Italian (i.e. EU) passport to use in place of a work visa. It would give me much more flexibility in working there…because you don’t think that the whole point of this is to work, right? That’s just to subsidize the travel I wanted to do. I thought that it would be cool to live in a really big city where they talk kind of funny and where I’d be able to try new things and live in a different context…but a relatively familiar and safe context. It’s all about safety with me, you see. I am (clearly) not a risk-taker. Every small risk I have ever taken in my life has completely backfired on me. I am not a fan of the feeling. Anyway, the deal with the passport was that it would allow me to contract as a social worker through one of these agencies. Work a couple months, spend a month in Morocco. Work another couple months, try to find my family’s old vineyard near Naples. You get the idea. The whole social work thing is basically just to subsidize the whole travel thing, and I can’t do that without an Italian passport. Also, how cool would it be, to get in the European line at customs? Since both my names are very Italian, I could probably even pass as one if I kept my mouth shut, right? Awesome.

And that’s where my dad comes in. As much as I don’t want to talk about my former relationship on this journal anymore, I want even less to talk about my dad here, but of course you realize that since it would be through him that I would be eligible for citizenship…because that’s what getting another passport entails, actually getting dual citizenship. I talked to him about it for the first time last summer, about getting him to help me with getting together all his documents and everything, and he was basically okay with it. As I’ve said before, I’d be here for a thousand years if I started talking in depth about my family stuff, and I don’t think I will ever be comfortable doing so online, but the main point is that when I went to see him in August he was pretty helpful in a non-specific way. I considered the trip a success and I started to feel that maybe this really would happen. It was kind of exciting.

Eighteen months ago I thought I’d be in London now, in October 2005. I was very optimistic about how long the various processes would take, getting the GSCC registration (which, seriously, killed me. Six essays, all with original backup documentation, four references, big fat American dollars exchanged into not-quite-as-big British pounds, the whole thing. Killed me) and the passport stuff. You can imagine, of course, that I was doing a ton of research on this, especially getting citizenship. My mom has been an absolute angel, getting stuff like my Canadian birth certificate and her marriage and divorce papers, her birth certificate, all of it. I realized pretty quickly that no, 2005 was not going to be the year, but I was okay with that. I can spend some more time here, I thought. After all, I love Seattle and love my community here and feel as at home here as I do anywhere…which is to say, of course, not much. But still.

Anyway, things were chugging along pretty well in general except that I could not get in touch with the Italian consulate in San Francisco (we don’t have one in Washington State. Not enough Italians, I guess). I mean, literally, I would call and call and there wouldn’t even be a voice mail to leave a message. I’d call, nothing. Email, nothing. In the meantime I was getting a lot of information off the internet about getting citizenship, how the process works, so on and so forth. I’d read all these stories people wrote about their process and though it was clear from the beginning that it was going to be a process, I am ashamed to admit that I had no idea until last week how long it would take. That’s when, FINALLY, someone from the consulate got back to me…and realize I had been trying to get in touch with them at least since April or May, I still don’t know what I did wrong…and told me that the next appointment to make my application for Italian citizenship would be July 2006, and that it was usually a one-to-two year process after that. Three years. In July 2008 I might have the Italian passport. My GSCC registration is good until June 2008.

I am still kicking myself over not understanding more fully how long it would take. There were weeks at a time where I would get so frustrated with calling the consulate EVERY DAY and not even being able to leave a message that I would just forget the whole thing. I started looking into other travel options for next year…nothing as big and involved as quitting my job and moving to London, but, you know, something interesting anyway, like a month-long leave of absence. I just found out yesterday that one of those other options, going to do volunteer conservation/community work at a research station in the Galapagos Islands may actually work out in a couple of months, if I decide to do it. I wanted to leave myself a back door, another option. I have really gone back and forth this whole year, sometimes spending all my time looking at job postings in London and imagining where I would live and how I would go to Paris for weekends with Ashley. Other times I was all about deciding to take a smaller trip to do something a little more socially progressive and work on my Spanish, and still have a job and a life to come back to.

But always in the back of my head I’ve been thinking I’d go. August, maybe, after I present at this conference in Phoenix that my boss wants me to go to. I decided not to get my own place after I moved out of my last house because I wanted to save money and to be able to leave pretty quickly. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to Anna and she asked if I was going to come down to the ABL for Thanksgiving again this year and I said no, I was going home, and I was just about to say, well, maybe next year but I stopped myself because next year! I’ll be in London! Where they don’t even have Thanksgiving! Woo! I had conversations with Treasa about how probably I’d leave my bookshelves and the rest of my furniture in the house when I left, and thought about lending my car to my sister in Miami while I was gone since hers is always breaking down. I had it all figured out in my head. I have been secretive about it on this journal but for this entire year people I know in real life have been greeting me with “So! How’s London planning going?” It’s been kind of great to think about. I have just generally assumed that things would be working out the way I wanted them to: Italian passport, lots of flexibility and travel, friends already over there in London for me to hang out with. Perfect.

And now…well, you can imagine the absolute wreck I’ve been this week. I haven’t been that fun to be around, I’m sorry to report…one of my favorite co-workers has been sticking her head around the corner of my cube and going, with an exaggeratedly furrowed brow, “So. How’s the mood today?” I fired off a whole bunch of emails on Monday to the various agencies with which I’d been in contact sporadically since December and told them about the change in visa stuff. The results are, to put it mildly, not super encouraging. I can get a work visa still, because they still need social workers, but it’s way more restrictive than working under an EU passport would be. I’d have to work for a specific borough and I wouldn’t be able to contract, I’d have to basically take a full time position…which is, you know, what I have now. I wouldn’t be able to travel the way I want to and I wouldn’t even make as much money, at least according to one of the people I talked to. I just found out that one of my friends over there is moving back to the States soon. I always knew that I’d have to basically just take a deep breath and quit my job here and go over there with a set amount of money and just hope to get something before it ran out…but there are so fewer options with a work visa, it’s all of a sudden an even scarier proposition. With an EU passport I could get some other non-social work job, I guess, but with a work visa I am stuck with social work and with some pretty specific types of social work, to boot. It’s a very different feel. I have spent this week hating that different feel and not wanting to do it anymore.

Maybe it sounds ridiculous to you but I could just see it, you know, myself in London, working and traveling and doing something new and exciting and different. This was the thing, you understand…and I’m sort of ashamed to even admit this, but what the hell…that was supposed to the thing I’d do instead of getting married and buying a house and having kids like EVERYONE ELSE I KNOW. Literally, everyone else I know is going along being a responsible adult and I am still about seventeen years old, just kind of doing my own little meaningless thing, going to work, reading books, watching DVDs, thinking about octopuses. Everyone else around me is going through these big life changes but I still feel like a kid, and I decided last year that if that was the case, if I was going to have basically no responsibilities other than the ones that involve sendingn Netflix back in a timely manner and putting on pants before getting on the bus, well, then, hell, it was incumbent upon me to take advantage of it, right, like really use the fact that I don’t have a family, that I will never have a family, to do something fun and amazing and cool. Maybe moving to London and working and traveling doesn’t sound that fun and amazing and cool to you, but for me, who has never quite been able to make anything work, who has always been second best, the sidekick, the best friend, who has never starred in even her own life story, this is big. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I’d be absolutely lying if I said that this latest development hasn’t upset and depressed me very much. I went out with Treasa and Calin the other night and we were innocently talking about paint chips and I couldn’t help myself, I started in with “BUT WHAT IF YOUR DREAMS NEVER HAPPEN? MAYBE WE SHOULD ALL JUST BE SATISFIED WITH WHAT WE HAVE!”

This morning, though, on the bus I started thinking that maybe it’s still worth pursuing, even if I can’t do it exactly the way I want to. Maybe just seeing something through for once in my life will be so satisfying that I don’t have to really worry about the bureaucracy; just getting over there and living there for a while, no matter how quotidian, will be just as awesome as I’ve hoped. I don’t know, though. I haven’t made any decisions yet. The Galapagos thing could come together very quickly if I wanted to, and would be a hell of a lot cheaper, and would let me do something non-social worky for a while, like maybe actually work with my hands. I think I am taking the next couple weeks off from making any specific plans for next year, and am just going to stew a little. There is so much to think about.

I have to say that something that’s, weirdly, a little hard to give up is the idea of keeping the Plans Top Secret from my readers. It’s been kind of fun to have that theme going these past ten or fifteen months. Recently people have been writing me with their ideas of what the Plans might be…and I have to say, between the becoming a full-time octopus researcher (rock!) and adopting a child (eek!), you guys have some awesome ideas. In some ways I like what your version of the Plans were than my own. I did, though, want to write an absolutely triumphant Plans entry next year, all dropping the bomb with “I’m moving to London in a month!” I’ve imagined continuing to write this journal from over there and maybe getting to meet some of my UK readers and recording my expat lifestyle. Not to say I couldn’t still do that if I did go, but it’s a really different feel to be all “I made these plans and it was hard to get everything together but I did, I saw it through and now HERE I GO” than what I feel now, which is much more subdued and disappointing.

The reason I am telling you now, though, after wrestling with it all week, is because I want to ask your help. Firstly, if you or anyone you know has done something similar to what I’m wanting to do, I wish you’d tell me about it. If you are a social worker in London, or if you know anything about consulate procedures, or if you’ve ever spent any time working abroad on a work visa, your insight into this whole mess would be really valuable to me.

Even if you haven’t done those things and don’t know anyone who has, I still want you to tell me about times you took risks, or how something you thought would change your life didn’t in the way you expected it to, or how you managed to overcome obstacles to do something you really wanted to do. I want to know what your Top Secret Plans are or were or will be, and why you made them and how you dealt with them and what it was like to see them happen or not happen. This goes for people I know in real life (Hi Mom!) and people who have never emailed me before and everyone in between Usually when I have something big like this going on I really get into it with people, like I call everyone I know and make them tell me what they think about it. I haven’t really done that this week, I have just holed up and been unhappy and sorry for myself. I am never going to figure this out though without help from other people, so I am giving up the idea of presenting the culmination of the Plans all neat and shiny with a ribbon on top. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about these Plans…or really, about any other aspect of my life, but I want to involve the people in life in that process somehow, with the hope that I can get some more perspective and do what’s best and most interesting and funnest and most awesome. You know how important it is to be awesome, my friends. I’m trying as hard as I can.


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