One year living in Canada

A personal post.

Anniversaries

This March I celebrated:

1. One year living in Canada. (About one year and three months since I last set foot in New York, which is the longest I have ever been away from New York in my life.)
2. Nine years since the breakup I had with my former domestic partner, whom I dated for nearly seven years, from the age of 16-23. (About eight years since I started dating the person who is now my wife.)
3. Sixteen years since my hospitalization, at the age of sixteen. (Half a lifetime.)

Time is a gift, in so many ways I didn’t understand when I was 16. This year has been hard, and spring is always hard for me. And it is rewarding even when it’s hard.

Anniversaries I am looking forward to:

1. One year at my current job (May 2026)
2. One year since our former house in the US was sold (July 2026)
3. My next birthday (November 2026)
4. 10 years of regularly historical fencing (May 2027)
5. 10 years since I asked out my wife (January 2028)
6. Three years since becoming a permanent resident; citizenship eligibility (speculative, as we are not yet permanent residents; perhaps around 2030?)
7. January 20, 2038 (I think I’d like to do a combination vow renewal / UNIX epoch party. Our anniversary is mid-January, we met online, I think it just makes sense)

Moving to Canada: a small retrospective

I’m through the obvious changes now (traffic cones are evil, there are extra U’s in some words, etc.) and now discovering the vast number of subtler differences between the US and Canada.

It wasn’t easy, emotionally…

I have honestly found the international move to be much more emotionally difficult than I expected it would be. I didn’t think it would be easy. I thought it would be maybe twice as hard as the next hardest big move I did. I think it was more like 10x as hard.

Some of that is because I’m constantly taking self-inflicted psychic damage from reading the news. When I stopped using Twitter as my source of news, I decided that I would permit myself to check NPR daily; when we moved here, I added CBC to my list. That’s twice as much news website as before! And what a year it has been for psychically damaging news.

Some of it is also that, the last time I moved cross-country, it was honestly fine? Like, we made friends by showing up for our hobbies regularly, and if I got homesick I could fly home. Every time I left New York I had a clear idea of the next time I’d be back, and it was generally fewer than six months in the future. The things that were hard in Denver were not hard because of the move. There was some culture shock for sure but it was more around stuff like, opinions on what we value, stuff like gun control maybe, where my experience of New York was that there was a diversity of opinions, and my experience of Colorado was that there was still a diversity of opinions but the median opinion was shifted a bit. We spoke the same language most of the time, and I knew what things meant. Moving to Canada I am actually in better alignment (I think) with those around me about issues like gun control, but I am not very well aligned at all for how people talk to each other in casual settings. Even when we’re in English I don’t really feel like we speak the same language. People here are friendly - people go out of their way to help when I ask for help, in ways that feel extremely tangible and meaningful to me - but I feel like my style of “recreational complaining” as it were is not one that is widely common here. I don’t want to take more than I give. I am finding it difficult to read situations. For example, when I run a meetup or small event, if someone I don’t know walks in, I have a mini-script for myself and I follow it to check in on their interests. And in Canada, I don’t think that is necessarily working entirely the same when I attend events. People are reserved but that doesn’t mean they’re not friendly. I wouldn’t have necessarily called myself loud or overly chatty before, but here I sometimes feel very loud.

Another reason I’ve found it hard has been that there are a subset of people I used to be close to who are angry at me, as they seem to think that I ran away instead of trying to fix the bad things in the US. To some extent, they are right, but it’s generally white cis men who have been the least sympathetic to my face about this. It was a privilege that we could leave before it got so bad that it was fully untenable to stay, and, it is hard to be an immigrant. It is hard to have a temporary status and want it to be permanent. I know I chose this, but it is also hard to get reminders that some of the people I thought cared for me aren’t interested in what I actually need as much as they are about how they feel about it.

…nor was it easy logistically…

Since I made that post last October, I signed up for an intensive before-work French program, two hours a day at 8am every day, which I followed for four months. I did very little other than work, French, sleep, and eat between November and March. I have now completed roughly 250 hours of French instruction, plus homework, plus whatever I get from Duolingo, plus some conversation circles in our city, and a few chats with people for practice. I took the immigration exam in late March, and scored C1 in reading, low B2 in listening, high B1 in writing, and A1 in speaking (I knew I did poorly on speaking day-of but was still a bit surprised by this). I am not quite good enough to read a book for pleasure in French. I can watch a movie in French with French subtitles and understand most of it.

…but many of the best things are worth the effort.

The work I put in did pay off. We were invited to apply for permanent residence at the very end of April - my Express Entry score with the French points making me one of the top 2000 qualified people across Canada at the time of the invitation draw. It will be months before the application is fully complete and processed, but this was a huge step in the right direction.

I am already enjoying having a little more free time - I’m taking a workshop to sew a buttoned shirt for myself! I’m finalizing our summer plans! - and I’m excited to feel like, once we are permanent residents, I can be home.

I feel disoriented, but that doesn’t mean things are going poorly. I am learning to reorient myself over time.