Moving House →

June 11, 2015 Eimear Fallon

Someone recently gave me a piece of advice regarding savings and bad jobs: always have enough in the bank so that you can, at a moment’s notice, walk into your terrible job and say “fuck you, I quit.” It’s not a recommendation to actually take that action, of course, only that you have enough money to do it if things become absolutely dire.

With that in mind, uh, Tumblr: fuck you, I quit, and I’m moving this site to Squarespace.

I started using Tumblr in 2008. I’ve been using this platform for seven years. That’s nearly a third of my life. You know the concept of brand loyalty? That’s what that is. Tumblr has gone from bad to worse to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then throwing out the bathtub for good measure, because why the hell not, you’ve just thrown out your own offspring so you might as well commit to this terrible course of action.

Um.

This is all to say that I don’t like it here anymore. So much of this site is now geared toward something I’ll vaguely call “creators”, but I’m not including authors, or artists, or filmmakers in that description. It’s more suited for people creating glitch art, or GIFs of TV shows, or glorified Pinterest boards - which are all fine, but they are not me. I can count the number of people I follow who still keep straight-up blogs on this site on one hand, and god bless them, but this platform doesn’t belong to them.

I have 1,399 followers on here. My most popular post in the last month got 4 notes. There’s something hollow in seeing that disparity. I’d rather have a tiny but honest audience than a large level of casual disinterest.

All that said, posts will continue to appear here on Tumblr, if that’s your preferred method of consumption - they’ll look a little different, coming as they do from the new site, but there’s no harm in syndicating things here for those who might want to read it. Links to old posts, though, will point to the new site (where everything’s archived), and some extraneous stuff will go away.

The main thing is that I get to say goodbye to decisions like hiding blog controls from users, and awful boxed advertising, and recommendations for blogs that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. It feels great. I hope you check in every now and then.

January 15, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Also: I have been in the US for a few days now, and have restrained myself from writing anything about it because my head is still a little overwhelmed. But. Yes. We made it.

January 11, 2014 Eimear Fallon

January 11, 2014 Eimear Fallon

January 11, 2014 Eimear Fallon

You get used to different backdrops. The stack of CDs on the left; a faded pink headboard on the right, and my bed, in various states of disarray. When I come back to this country to visit, maybe a year from now, the bed will be gone, the room rearr… — You get used to different backdrops. The stack of CDs on the left; a faded pink headboard on the right, and my bed, in various states of disarray. When I come back to this country to visit, maybe a year from now, the bed will be gone, the room rearranged with guests in mind. Already, this room looks so much emptier. Shelves are left clear. Cupboards are empty. I am moving around a third of the things I own, but two thirds doesn’t look like much when it’s spread out.

It’s not the moving that feels strange - I’ve moved before, to student houses and apartment complexes sixty miles away, often bringing more and more of my belongings as the year progressed. What makes this different is where I’ll be weighing anchor - studying in York, there was always the sense that Stockport was my home, where I’d lay my head once all of this was over. This time is different.

Tomorrow night, I will fall asleep next to Arden, and I know that while the surroundings may take some getting used to, that visceral feeling of being *home* will already be present. Home can be a lot of things, I suppose. Here, it’s my parents, and my best friend living five minutes away, and that purple stripe above the curtain rail, and thinking in the metric system. There are a thousand things in this country that make it feel like home, and one person in the United States who, for me, captures that feeling without the backup of the sort of cultural backdrop you can assimilate over twenty-three years.

The rest - guessing the weather outside without mental arithmetic, dealing with an over-reliance on cars, approaching an economy with different priorities to the UK - will take time. But I’m not worried. I’ll have the company of someone truly remarkable while I navigate through the small stuff, and that’s more than enough.

January 7, 2014 Eimear Fallon

January 5, 2014 Eimear Fallon

So. It is 4am, or near enough, and I have to be up in six hours because my sister is flying out to Amsterdam and my family want us all to have brunch together before she goes.

I will see my best friend for the last time tomorrow. The farewells have… — So. It is 4am, or near enough, and I have to be up in six hours because my sister is flying out to Amsterdam and my family want us all to have brunch together before she goes.

I will see my best friend for the last time tomorrow. The farewells have been staggered - a raucous night at the pub a week ago with some friends, a New Year’s Day party with a few bartender friends, and tomorrow I’ll be spending my afternoon and evening with Joe. Joe, who I’ve known for nearly twelve years, who has already begun a foray into some respectable career, who will always feel connected to me on some visceral level. I have hated Joe in the way you hate a brother - with love burning behind your eyes. I’ve had plenty of horrifying arguments with people who turned out to be enemies, but with Joe we developed a safe space to be utterly terrible people. As long as you get the balance right, there’s value in something like that.

The last friend I will see is Jack, who I have known for nearly six years now. That comes on Thursday. Other than that, the week ahead is barren - my parents are working, my friends are scattered to all ends of the country or the places they work, and I will be left staring at this countdown.

There are blessings and curses in knowing how long you have to wait. A rise in anxiety, but a dissolution of the cloud of depression.

Not long now. Just a few more days.

December 27, 2013 Eimear Fallon

Going for a walk on Boxing Day has become a family tradition over the last decade or so; we’ll shove a full English breakfast into our faces, then head out to a park or reservoir in the freezing cold and walk around it until the shivers have replaced the bloatedness.

There are small things like this that I will miss. I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the conveniences and advantages of the UK that I’ll be leaving behind, but something doesn’t have to be uniformly positive in order to feel its loss. The idea of going for a hike in the middle of winter, in shoes that are hardly designed for any weather worse than light showers, is a bit of a ludicrous one - nevertheless, it’s an annual event, predictable in its slight discomfort and numb fingertips, and when Boxing Day (or, as it’s known in the US, December 26th) rolls around next year, I’ll feel the absence.

Over time, I expect other things to fill those gaps. The joy of moving is that instantly, there is something new in place - the immediate presence of the love of my life, a family willing to take me under their wing, and a thousand strange American things that creep up on you and insinuate themselves into everyday life. (I had never seen a toaster oven before I came to America, and while I’ll concede that they do exist here, it’s easier to pretend that they don’t.)

But now, there’s value in taking each tradition, one by one, and breathing it in for the last time. A little meditation in the cold.

December 19, 2013 Eimear Fallon

I am lying in a tiny hotel room in London at one in the morning, six hours before I’m supposed to wake up, the night before I walk over to the embassy of the United States and ask them very nicely to allow me into their country.

I can’t… — I am lying in a tiny hotel room in London at one in the morning, six hours before I’m supposed to wake up, the night before I walk over to the embassy of the United States and ask them very nicely to allow me into their country.

I can’t sleep. Which I maybe should have predicted.

Put part of it down to the fact that I drank a bottle of Mountain Dew before bed, weeks after I quit caffeine. Sure. And part of it certainly comes from the fact that the job I’ve been doing mandates that I keep weird hours, starting as it does at two in the afternoon and ending at ten in the evening. I’m used to losing consciousness at three.

But a lot naturally comes from the fact that, short of stepping onto an aeroplane, this is the last step in a process that started back in January. As long as my application is approved tomorrow, I’ll be out of the country in a few weeks, in Arden’s arms, and staying there. There’s a sense of exhilaration, accompanied by the sheer blind terror that somehow, after doing everything right (even considering the Kafka-esque, constantly changing criteria the Department of State lays out) I might have done something wrong.

A lot on my mind tonight. There is a sharp edge I’m sleeping on that only the events of tomorrow can properly blunt.

2013-11-19

November 20, 2013 Eimear Fallon

I didn’t say anything about it, because for a few days I wanted the news to be mine. The instinct to share every major life event only really reveals its ferocity when you go against it, and I wanted to feel that and let it subside - to actually make the decision to talk about my life a decision, rather than the done thing.

The news is that in exactly one month’s time, assuming everything goes to plan, I’ll be safe in the knowledge that my visa application has been approved, beginning to plan a wedding and sorting out my travel plans for early January. This is all immensely exciting, obviously, but also surreal. You grow used to waiting after a while, and although I have over a month more to wait, I’m starting to see the end.

By March next year, I’ll be married. By May, I’ll be looking for jobs in another country. Maybe by the end of next year, I’ll have a green card. Understand: these are not dates, but they’re the beginning of a solidification that’ll only get more specific as time goes by. The point is that the artificial bottleneck that has been applied to my progression through life thanks to a lengthy immigration process is about to be cleared, and that’s simultaneously freeing and terrifying. But mostly surreal.

Maybe it’s because the journey itself is so straightforward. There are no long, multi-week voyages to endure if you want to end up in the United States; granted, there’s a lot more preamble than there used to be, but once I get on a plane I can fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the world. One long blink, and suddenly everything has changed. There are people I’m gaining - not least my fiancé - who were absent from me before. There are also people I’m losing. I lost some of them last week, when my work contract at a local further education college ended, and the eight people I’d spent a year getting to know left my life forever. But there will also be friends - I’ll presumably keep in contact with those who are closest, but there will be some on the fringes who’ll drift away.

We’ve been through all of that, though. I’m starting to run the risk of repeating myself, having been thinking about this for so long. The main thing at the moment is getting to grips with the reality of it all, but that’s something that’ll likely only start to happen when I actually arrive.

I should truncate this, then: one month until the next milestone. Then we’ll see what happens.

October 22, 2013 Eimear Fallon

I’m in this odd state of flux, where I’m torn between being anxious to leave and anxious to experience everything British one last time - often, one follows the other almost immediately, like a reprimand.

Yesterday, we went to Dunham Massey - a park and stately home about twenty minutes’ drive from my house. We came here quite a lot when I was younger - it’s big enough that you can spend the whole day walking around, but the main attractions are localised enough that you can get around them in about an hour. I came camping here once when I was in the Cub Scouts.

My anxiety about the future comes from the things I stand to lose. When I arrive in America, whether I prosper or not will rely almost exclusively on the generosity of others - so much money has been consumed by actually getting out there that I really don’t have much left. Things as simple as healthcare and a social safety net are out of my grasp. But there are wider things, too. I can start walking in one direction in the town where I live, and within 15 minutes I can end up in the middle of a forest - and I don’t exactly live out in the countryside. Walking in general is important to me, but the place I’m moving to - while blessed with plenty of footpaths - is too insular to really encourage any creativity in your choice of route. Getting outdoors is exercise, not pleasure.

There are new boundaries to negotiate when I arrive. A whole world of unfamiliar contours. Cell phone plans, student loan repayment, a job market that sees a one-hour commute as an advantage rather than a hassle. Cheaper food. Better television. And, alongside all that, trying to hold up my end and stay confident alongside someone for whom the US way of doing things is second nature. I have seen the word “alien” a lot in the last few months, and I am starting to see why.

For now, though, there are parks, and short bus journeys to the heart of the city, and no air conditioning, and the NHS. There is a job I can commute to in fifteen minutes. Time left to examine and reflect on the things I have while I’m here.

September 18, 2013 Eimear Fallon

An unordered list of things you need to do when you move to the United States of America

August 18, 2013 Eimear Fallon

Try not to panic.
Suddenly scrabble around for “documentary proof of a relationship”. This can be: ticket stubs, flight itineraries, Skype call records, photographs. This cannot be: late-night explicit Skype chatlogs, half-finished erotica, a nagging sense of loss whenever you leave each other.
Somehow amass £2,500 in savings from a job that pays you £6,000 a year. Do this by obsessively accounting for every expense, continuing to live in your parents’ house, and taking on extra work whenever you can.
Really, don’t panic. It’s going to be okay.
Go to London and pay £227 for a doctor to examine every part of your body, including but not limited to a chest x-ray and careful inspection of your genitals. Pay another £150 for vaccines that you would never need in the UK, including but not limited to rabies, rotavirus, and hepatitis B.
Pay another doctor in America $20 to look at your newly-completed vaccination records and copy them onto a form, then put it in an envelope.
Get used to doing everything in triplicate.
Get used to waiting.
Make vague plans for the things you can plan: getting a US driver’s licence, a rough picture of the job market in the US, where you’re going to get married. Try and keep them as firm as you can without over-planning.
I mean it, panicking solves nothing. I know that living and breathing bureaucracy for two years of your life isn’t what we in the business call “fun”, but there is an endgame here.
Try and remember that other people are going through this process because if they don’t, they’ll be executed by authoritarian governments.
Don’t deliberately go looking for horror stories on visa forums. Keep in mind the statistics - that, taking into account appeals, 99% of the people applying for this visa have it granted. Which, given that it’s also the visa with the highest rate of fraud, is not a bad statistic.
Try and gently loosen ties without severing them altogether. Gear up for departure. Don’t obsess over what you’re leaving behind, but don’t ignore it either.
Remember why you’re doing this. Remember that a few thousand miles away is the person who changed your life, who makes you laugh more than everyone else you know combined, who inspires you to work harder and make art in a way that no-one else does, who is so jaw-droppingly beautiful that you sometimes need to pinch yourself when you’re in a room together.
Don’t allow a mountain of paperwork to distract from essential truths, like the fact that buried under that mountain is love so impossibly solid and secure that you’re amazed it exists.
Keep in mind: a green card is just a means to an end, and that end is fantastic.

22...

April 7, 2013 Eimear Fallon

… is a weird age, because you start to realise that from here on in, any milestones are fairly frivolous - you will continue to learn, continue to evolve your attitudes, and hopefully continue to improve, but that fundamental 21-year-long development process is more or less over.

I’m in limbo at the moment: I can’t begin a career, because any job I take in the next few months will be over before I know it. My current job is part-time, and I’m learning, but there are things I could be doing - courses I could be taking - that I’m deliberately avoiding because it would all be cut short.

This isn’t a complaint, exactly - it’s more a recognition that there are elements of my life that are only likely to begin next year. (I’ll still be moving to the United States this year, but the law forbids me from working until I receive my immigration documents granting me indefinite leave to remain - a best case scenario puts this at a month, worst case at a few more, so I likely won’t be looking for a job the second I touch down in Boston.) It’s not so distant that I feel hopeless, but there’s this constant reminder that the things I fill my life with now are symptomatic of waiting for the future, rather than embracing it.

On the worst days, it’s frustrating. Anxiety still bothers me. Every day is an exercise in getting better at dealing with it, and it’s a sign of progress that I’m still on a curve of having more good days than bad ones, but at the same time I recognise that the bad ones still exist. When illness, or storms, or any number of uncontrollable factors slow things down, sometimes there’s the red flare that yells that you have put things on hold for this, and that you’re making a sacrifice, and - no.

Having the freedom to leave the country and live with my fiancé without being constantly terrified about the next month’s rent is an extremely privileged position to occupy. Having a period where I can soak up as much culture as possible, to finish my book, to spend quality time with friends and (dare I say it) family before I climb onto a plane with no certain return date - these are all really good things, and the fact that I sometimes forget them to dwell on my career - important, of course, but people ruled by their jobs are rarely happy - is all guided by a constant slide to negativity that I’m trying my best to fight against.

I have so many reasons to be pleased with my lot at the moment. Yes, there are things missing. Two key things: the physical presence of the person I intend to marry, and a job that has potentially unlimited room to develop. These are big things, but so is unfettered access to my best friend. So is the fact that I was able to sit down today and write a thousand words without shoring aside time. Cheap(ish) public transport. Disposable income. Three public libraries within walking distance - lots of things within walking distance. The ability to talk to my Mum whenever I feel like it. These are things I should always value.

And I’m trying. I really am. What was about 60% of the time, the rest ruled by apathy and that perpetual tightness in my chest, has been steadily increasing for some time. I’m still holding out hope that it’ll increase to 100%. One day at a time. It’s okay to feel like you’re on a journey without constantly noting that the destination is a few hundred miles off. No-one wants to be the kid who can’t stop whining. “Are we there yet?” No, but while you were looking sullen and shifting in your seat you missed a hundred beautiful landmarks.

Structure

March 24, 2013 Eimear Fallon

It’s been a while since I sat down with the sole intention of spilling my thoughts onto here, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is. I’m at a bit of a weird stage at the moment - like a thousand tiny threads are wrapped around my limbs, and they’re pulling in different directions without warning. Objectively, my life isn’t a challenge at the moment, but the less predictable parts of my brain can turn the most mundane of events into an opportunity for joy or a total ordeal.

Maybe I should take stock. So.

My writing is ticking along. If you haven’t yet glanced at the recent piece I wrote for A Bright Wall In A Dark Room, you could do that. I’ve also been posting progress reports on Dystopolis in this tag, and I’ve started writing something about Four Lions that’ll end up somewhere (it might be here, if I can’t get anyone else to take interest, but it’s a while off). I think I can say I’m just about back into the swing of things. Where I might have written something like this in the past, now I’ll open Word and keep working on short stories or essays. I’m even collaborating again, working on a piece of interactive fiction with Joe. I’m managing my time a little better.

I’ve been reaching out a little more often. One thing I regret over the last year or so is isolating myself a little, neglecting the community value you can get from a website like this, and I’m hoping to do a little more to make myself available. There’s the URL change, the willingness to use my real name again; there are people I wouldn’t wish this openness on, but my skin is thick enough to take the occasional unpleasant comment with the good.

I still don’t quite have the best handle on things. I spent three hours tonight trying to set up a PC game before I realised the futility of what I was doing, and by that time I’d - well - spent three hours on it. Sometimes I’ll still put things off. Sometimes I’ll still fall into dwelling on negative thoughts. I’m not perfect, and feeling better about myself is always going to be a work-in-progress.

Because a few of you have asked: yes, I’m still engaged, and yes, I’m still moving to the United States at some point this year. We’re yet to put in the visa petition (it’s likely to be next week, but there are inevitable hurdles to something like this that you just have to be philosophical about). I still struggle to articulate my feelings about this whole process, even to myself. There are background certainties - that I’m in love, and that this is what I want to do - but the day-to-day throws up a lot of feelings that are difficult to understand.

There are a couple of things I might start to do soon. Podcasting is one; getting fitter is another (I’m still waiting for warmer weather, and it snowed today). I’m nervous about both.

Hanging in there.

Today in Tomorrow

September 9, 2012 Eimear Fallon

I’m going to move to America.

Let that one sink in for a moment. Remember that for the last few months, I’ve been futilely attempting to bring Arden, my fiancé to this country. That the last time I had considered emigrating was around the age of eighteen, long before I had even heard of Arden or met most of the bunch of native USA-ians who I now call friends. Bear in mind that this plan is so new that I haven’t even told my Dad yet.

Got a sense of what I’m dealing with yet?

I say “dealing with”. This is exciting, as it should be. And I’ve been on a strange high for the last few days that I haven’t felt in months.

Putting it simply: my main priority right now is getting to be with Arden. It’s for a few reasons, and not just the short-sighted “I love her” one. Arden motivates me to be a better person, be more proactive, and - contradicting the age-old cliché of neutering one’s personality to fit a partner - express myself more and be an individual. I thrive around Arden, and I want the chance to do that.

Doing that by bringing her here was always going to be hard, of course. I’d need to get to a point where I was 100% self-sufficient, having moved out and earning enough to fully support two people. I am an English and Philosophy graduate. I might have a nice little temp job until the end of October, but I’m not even close to that. Add in a family willing to put ethical principles in front of short-term suffering, and it was always going to be rough.

And then things got worse. There’s currently legislation being drafted that’d bump up the minimum salary requirement for a UK citizen moving their fiancé or spouse to this country to around £23,000. I’m not going to earn that for a while unless I’m extremely lucky. And by “a while”, I mean years. And there are peripheral reasons, too - while the employment situation anywhere is dire at the moment, there are a lot more small presses in the USA and a lot of video game companies. And in the US, there are people willing to offer their generosity so that I can settle in. It’s still a long road, but it’s something that feels within reach.

It means that the low-wage, low-stress job that I’m doing at the moment counts towards a savings goal that’s lofty, but not so daunting that it doesn’t feel within reach. (I’m uncomfortable saying what that goal is, as I’m not looking for yet more offers of money, but I feel confident that Arden and I can reach it.) Even if/when I’m getting a pitiful sum from the government while I look for a new job, I can add it to the steadily-growing pile. This is all stuff I couldn’t really do before. There wasn’t any point - what’s a few thousand saved now when it’s just going to fester until I’m two or three steps up the career ladder?

I feel like I have agency for the first time in months. Maybe even years - granted, I was studying, but there’s nothing like an arts degree to make you feel like you’re not doing anything with your life.

This feels like a new chapter, rather than a really slow page-turn. On Monday morning, I’ll be going into work with just a little more energy, because I know that what I’m doing is worth something. I’m looking forward to living with the person I love, and having the breathing space to make a life together without collapsing under stress. It’ll be months until we can even put the next step into effect - beyond October, I have no planned employment, and welfare payments only bring in so much - but the end has turned from something in whose direction we’re blindly sailing to a faint glimmer on the horizon.

I turned 22 last week, and after a few very long months, I feel like I’m finally getting things on track.