The small strings.
None of this has been easy. For anybody.
But I’ve been wondering if maybe the fact that I moved across the ocean almost two years ago, far away from friends and family, made me better prepared for the distance. I’ve already had 20 months’ worth of practice making connection happen across the miles. Of remembering to send a text that composes itself in my head at 7am local time but can’t be sent until at least 9am Central. Of making plans for virtual coffee dates. Of sending off a lengthy email when when a pithy Facebook message won’t suffice. Of finding ways to show the people I love that just because I can’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t always in my heart…
Now that I think about it, it’s really been closer to 3 years of practice. Between that evening we reunited in London in June 2017 and the morning we got married in my St. Paul living room in March 2018, Joe and I spent just shy of a year re-courting each other from across the ocean.
I’m pretty good at this distance stuff.
Mostly.
So many things were hard when I first moved to Belgium. And that was with the cushy landing afforded to me by Joe having already lived in Brussels for a year and the fact that the embassy literally has an office devoted to helping us build community (amongst CLO’s many other areas of responsibility).
Even as I began to find the people who felt like they could become my people, I was lonely much of the time. Some of that loneliness stemmed from teleworking and not going into an office even occasionally. And some of it stemmed from the loss of micro-interactions in my new daily life.
I’ve always been one to strike up a small conversation with the barista at Starbucks or the clerk bagging my groceries. One might think that I’m being altruistic but that’s not it entirely. I get as much out of those small moments as I hope to give. A beat or two of human connection has sometimes been what’s saved me.
But it was harder here in Brussels — in part due to my own inability to tell a store clerk anything more than a polite merci et bonne journée at the end of a transaction and in part due to the cultural differences that require a more reserved approach. I suppose some of it was my own newly-acquired shyness born from the embarrassment of struggling to fit in.
In the past few months, it’s gotten a bit easier and I’ve had more and more of those tiny and fleeting connection points lately. The phlebotomists at the hospital clinic have been a surprising source of small talk — who would have guessed that a Moroccan-Belgian man would have a sister in Texas or that a Vietnamese-Belgian woman would be surprised to hear that a girl from Minnesota misses phở?
I haven’t said much about the job at the embassy I started at the end of the year. I guess I’ve been trying to figure out the balance between public and private, open and secure…
I was originally hesitant to apply for a spot within the Tri-Mission. Jobs available to family members are often limited in scope and almost always offer no options for forward advancement. But there came a point when teleworking no longer felt sustainable and my need for more structure, a better schedule, and daily in-person interaction won out over my earlier reservations. So, with the help of our Global Employment Advisor, I worked on my candidacy packet for an administrative assistant role supporting the embassy’s Executive Office. It took MONTHS for the paperwork to come through but it finally did and I started right after Thanksgiving.
In my time on the job, I’ve had moments of feeling like a fish out of water (and who wouldn’t as they navigate government systems and processes for the first time?!) alongside moments of “I’ve got this” (because so many of the things I’ve been asked to do have allowed me to draw on my past experience). Some of my duties are mundane like fetching the mail and ordering more toner for the copier and some of them outside anything I could have ever imagined. I certainly couldn’t have anticipated hand delivering a gift to an honest-to-goodness royal palace…
The paycheck’s good but not great. And the schedule has me leaving the house a bit earlier than I’d like to in the mornings. But the mental health boost from actually getting to interact with people other than my husband every workday has made it worth it.
I share an office with a local staffer who’s both an absolute riot and one of the most generous colleagues I’ve ever worked with. From Dutch sayings to the finer points of protocol, I’ve learned so much from Mevrouw K in these past few months. And I’ve laughed harder than I ever expected I would when I applied for “just” an admin job.
But it’s not so much my officemate that I’ve been missing since COVID-19 forced us to start working from home. Daily check-in calls with her and our supervisor have kept the three of us in sync with not only our workload but also the water cooler chitchat.
I’ve been surprised by how much I miss the looser connections of my daily life: the Marine guards who greet me at the door each morning, the mailroom guys who playfully teased when the baby goods started rolling in from Amazon, the kind cafeteria staff who fuss over me (and everybody else) when I go downstairs to get a coffee and a pastry mid-morning, the colleagues who I see almost daily but who I’m not necessarily friends with… I even miss the woman who rides the metro with her two boys most mornings and who exchanges knowing smiles with me as the boys get off to head to school.
In networking, there’s a theory that it’s your loosest connections — those in your network but not part of your daily life — that will often lead to the greatest luck when you’re looking for a job. I wonder if there’s a lesson to be learned there…
I’ve found that I’m still really good at the distance thing (mostly) but that the small strings making up the fabric of my daily life are perhaps the ones that are harder to replicate now that we’re in isolation. They’re the ones that I would reach out to and say “hey, I know we just smile and wave at each other usually and I don’t even know your name, but I’ve been wondering how you’re doing. I really hope you’re OK.”
