what i’m up to

This week, I’m excited to be attending an art exhibition opening, where a selection of my paintings will be featured for the first time ever! I was thrilled to be invited to share my portfolio with the gallery and have a few items chosen to be exhibited along with 4 other artists. If you’re in town, come out for the opening event on Wednesday the 22nd of March! But it will be open for viewing until the end of May, so there is lots of time.

I’m on a week-long break from classes, which is very timely. I slept for almost 18 hours on the first day and still went to bed early the next night and slept for nearly 9 more hours til alarms went off to remind me I don’t want to sleep away all this glorious free time! Sleep is good, but so is accomplishing everything that becomes “too much” when also giving 16 lectures a week to 244 second-year university students.

I do want to come back to producing more regular publications here again, so watch this space!

what’s on my mind

I’m sitting in a nearby coffee shop right now contemplating how it’s been over a year since I resigned from my last job and nearly a year since I finished out my notice. There are lots of what-ifs that come up from time to time in my mind, but I have to remind myself to not spend too much time on them aside from focusing on what I can still learn from it all. I am so glad to be living here in Cambodia.

A week or two ago, I had the privilege of sharing some of my poems in a poetry showcase here in the city, and I picked three that reflect on my life as an international, a migratory bird, and that mostly centre on my Caribbean homeland. Someone asked me afterwards about where all I have lived and why I like Cambodia so; and one of the reasons I keep coming back to is how very familiar this place is to me. COVID-19 2-week-quarantine-from-hell upon arrival aside, it was easier to move and adjust to life here than it was to move to the USA, and living here is more natural and comfortable to me than living in rural or urban USA ever was. It isn’t because life is fundamentally easier here than there or that I haven’t had difficult adjustments here, too, but this place feels and smells and breathes more like all the other places I grew up and lived. I think the USA is the most intensely different and difficult place I ever tried to reside. And although it is about equal in how much homesickness I experienced, it is also the most isolating place I ever lived, because I was a hidden immigrant.

I love that here feels so much like home and yet has so much new and wondrous for me to learn and explore. I love that I feel more connected to myself here and all my homes (including those I built in the USA!) than I have in many years, while still having the joy and the challenge of creating a new home and learning a new language (however slowly…). I love that in this place I know I am a foreigner and I’m 100% ok with that – for perhaps the first time in my life – and all the places that make me up are wrapped up under that one label and it works. (It only gets tricky when they ask my passport nationality, since that never remotely tells the whole or full or real story.)

Books I’m in the middle of right now:

• Heart of the Sun Warrior, by Sue Lynn Tan (book 2 of the Celestial Kingdom Duology). LOVING this
• All the Lovers in the Night, by Mieko Kawakami. So interesting so far!

This post is a snippet from a newsletter I originally published on Substack. You can read the complete publication there. 

What I’m up to
Sometimes when I’m really tired and wondering why, I realise that I bring this on myself. Perhaps if I crammed less living in, or didn’t always pursue such new experiences, or take on such enormous things, or make continuous Major Life Choices, I’d be less tired. But then, I also get bored and wonder about the point of life. I’m meant to live large; I just think fate forgot to make me independently wealthy so living large was a little less exhausting from balancing up against making a living…

That said, what have I been up to? Here are just a few highlights:

• Continuing to adjust to life as a business school lecturer. Just when I was starting to find some rhythm, the newest element arises: midterms, major assignments, and grading. My goodness, I love being in the classroom with my students and having such interesting discussions with them and fun exchanges, but the learning curve for switching from business world to teaching is about as intense as my learning curve going from being a freshly minted university graduate to the business world was!
• Finding a new place to live. Nothing was wrong with where I lived since moving here, but it no longer was working for what I need. (Example, the commute was quite long). Trying to find a new place to move into that fits my requirements and desires and budget was quite the experience, though! That said – I succeededl
• Moving out of one place and into a new one. It was a whirlwind move this month from my first apartment here into another, and a sharp reminder how quickly we accumulate things in life (or I do, anyways. Don’t ask my Mother what I was like as a child. It may scar you….). Moving is absolutely exhausting and I feel quite shattered from the process – but still some more unpacking/settling in to go. I absolutely love the new place, though! It makes me smile every day I wake up here so far.
• Language lessons. I’m out of the first “level” of classes and into the 2nd one, and I have never not wanted to continue classes more! I love learning languages, and Khmer is fascinating! That said, I’ve felt so overwhelmed and tired this past month that I really considered if this is something I was willing to keep doing right now. But honestly, since I am choosing to stay in this country, then I firmly think that right up there should be taking the time to actually learn the language – even if that means less time doing other activities or is a little less glamorous or shiny as the newness wears off and the hard work of memorisation begins. It is satisfying to be able to communicate incrementally better, though!

What I’m thinking about right now
I find myself missing the Autumn season a lot lately; getting out my favourite dark green cashmere sweater and black leather skirt with fleece-lined tights and knee-high boots and my paisley swirling Nepali scarf and cozy cap and walking out in the brisk air on damp brick sidewalks slick with already decaying leaves discarded from the gloriously changing trees. This was always the only season I truly loved since leaving the rainy/dry seasons of the Caribbean and now it is my second year away from it. (My goodness I miss it!!)

Similarly, I have now moved into my second home in Cambodia, and am on my second job here, and my second business visa.

These things make my decision to “Just come here for a little while” so very…solid. It’s not a small thing anymore, not that it ever really was. But it is undeniably not a small thing now.

I am here. I don’t know how long I will be here. I simply am here. But since I continue to make decisions that have me continuing to live here, continuing to root down further; I also have to decide – do I keep storing things in the States? Do I sell the rest of the things? Do I try to ship it here? (But am I ready to commit to staying here long enough to make a shipment at my cost worth it?) How long will I stay here? These are questions that make me very tired. I do not have answers for them yet

Some of my students asked me in class a week or two ago why I like it here; why I have been choosing to stay. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that – and maybe I’ll share my thoughts on it in my next update. It’s certainly woven in right now to all the decisions past and present that I’m pondering.

Meanwhile, I was nominated to serve as a mentor in a new program launched by AmCham in Cambodia’s Women’s Committee, and it’s exciting to get to be part of giving back – and through an organisation whose branch in my hometown actually gave me my first ambition to become a businessperson.

Life is so full of beginnings and endings and when we think we find an ending, it’s merely a beginning but perhaps not of what we thought at that time. The mystery is thrilling and overwhelming at times, but also wondrous—and I’m glad of it.

This post is a snippet from a newsletter I originally published on Substack. You can read the complete publication there. 

what I’m up to

I’ve been abysmal this past month and a half in providing updates – partly for so much happening at once and partly because I was waiting for things to happen enough to announce. Now, I can!

About four weeks ago, I took up the role of teaching business communications at a business school here in Phnom Penh. My life since then has been full of lesson planning and strategizing, teaching, getting used to the business school and its educational model, and getting to know my students. So far I am absolutely loving it, although waking up early in order to traverse the city and be awake and energetically enough to teach a 7:30 AM class as a night owl rather than a morning person has been challenging. It was also pretty fantastic to receive a paycheck after 5 months again.

Besides taking on this role I am also excited to be speaking at an event this weekend, “Strategic Position in Digital Marketing,” on brand and the importance of language in your brand strategy and communications materials. If you are in Phnom Penh, check it out!

Besides this, I strive to still maintain time to attend events around the city, spend with friends, volunteer, read a little bit more again, and for mus

I’ve also resumed my Khmer lessons and am thoroughly enjoying those each week!

What I’m thinking about and learning

My visa in Cambodia has now been extended for another year—another thing I’m relieved and pleased to have clarity on. Somehow I’m already in a next and entirely unplanned second year of life here. It is wild and wonderful to me that at the moment my life is nothing like what I could possibly have imagined it to be. I’m teaching my students at the moment about personal development and planning for their professional life and my own is such an illustration of how winding and fascinating a life can be. Certainly full of the unexpected, which can lead to the wildly wonderful when we are open to it.

On the flip side, with the past month and a half, the reality of living as far away as possible from people I never liked living far from at all in the first place has also settled in. Choosing to stay here—not because of what I get in staying (which is yay!) but for what I miss out on as a result (like being close to siblings or meeting new nibblings or friends and life in other worlds of mine)—is achingly hard in some ways. My newest nephew was born this weekend and I don’t know when I will get to meet him or see that sister and brother-in-law again. Assessing my skills/abilities for jobs and what I want to actually do and analyzing them against a risk matrix and the backdrop of what is possible, plausible, and profitable (enough) is challenging – and in taking on this new teaching role I walked away from potentially another amazing opportunity. How do we know we are making the right decisions? (I think we don’t usually get to know; we just have to make it so.) Watching friends go through major decisions of their own or experience really challenging surprises – both friends here in Phnom Penh and friends far flung across the globe and not being able to be there with them is also hard.

But amid the good, bad, and ugly is a little nugget of truth revealing itself to me – that perhaps the thing I dread most in all the world is the idea of stagnancy; of reaching a point of no further movement. Of giving up on exploring and missing out on the wild wonder of the beyond.

This post is a snippet from a newsletter I originally published on Substack. You can read the rest of the publication there.