Very recently, like in the span of 9 days, I lost two friends. Friends I have known for years. One friend died suddenly and the other had been battling cancer for a while. Both died long before their time.

It struck me at my core. One day these people were in my life, and the next they were gone.

It gave me pause.

It reminded me of my own mortality and of the fact that life is short. It reminded me of the deaths of other friends and the fact that the worst thing to do with life, is waste it. To not live it to its fullest. To live with regret.

I recently told my best friend that I feel suffocated here. I’m tired of asking people to do things and nothing ever happening. I’m tired of wanting to do things and waiting for someone else to agree to come with me. I feel like while I had to work hard on international assignment to establish myself, I have to work three times as hard here, with much less success. I’m just plain fucking tired. And lonely. I’m not used to spending so much time away from my friends. It’s a hard adjustment to make.

I didn’t want to come back here, and, truth be told, most days, if someone handed me an opportunity abroad, we’d definitely be keen to take it. Repatriation is hard. People see my Facebook and think I look happy and settled, the reality is that it’s a daily struggle to face the cards that life has dealt us and I’m working incredibly hard to simply exist here. It’s taken some hard decisions, setting up some firm boundaries and cutting some people out of my life for the benefit of my own mental health, but I’m trying. Every day I get up and try.

It feels like the friends we still have from years ago are all expecting us to leave again, no one’s getting comfy with the fact that we’re back, not that I can really blame them and that no one has really made an allowance for the fact we’re back, either. Everyone’s lives are the same as they were before we got back. We aren’t really a regular in anyone’s lives here, other than those we work with, or see at school on a daily basis. Col leaves at 7.20am each morning and comes home at 6pm every evening. I’ve essentially become a single parent with two part-time jobs during the week and the support networks I had set up quickly in both India and Texas, are nowhere to be seen here. I can’t seem to find my feet. When I finally feel like I have my shit together a little, something gives and the goal-post moves. I’m back to square one. Sure you’re ‘home’, what support could you possibly need. Everyone works, everyone balances parent-life-work balance, everyone has shit to contend with. Get over it and figure yourself out. 

If I try to talk to people about it, they seem to take it personally. Or tell me I’m taking things personally.

I get it. I’ve been gone from this place for the guts of ten years. I’m the one who left. Now I’m trying to crowbar my way back in. That’s a long time to be gone.

This place has changed, the people have changed, I, too, have changed. I’m not the same young, unemployed, wet behind the ears Queens graduate who left on a plane for Texas all those years ago.

I’m not happy here, I’m not sure I ever will be happy here and despite people saying you ‘just’ need to shift your mindset, or ‘give the place a chance’, some days it’s really fucking hard and despite whatever appearances that I’m not ‘trying’, I truly am. And yet I still feel like I just don’t belong here. I spoke to Col about it last week, I felt like I was going out of my mind. For example, my therapist had told me that the troubles in Northern Ireland that I was bringing up in my sessions because I don’t want my son raised surrounded by them, were ‘just history’, I didn’t agree. I don’t agree. I feel like the country is drowning in decades-old political trauma that no one wants to address. Yet everyone is engulfed in. I was starting to feel like maybe it really was just ‘me’, so I mentioned it to him. He told me to think of our time here as just another expat assignment, and that’s fine if we know for sure that our time here is temporary. But we don’t. So I can’t. And the universe is moving just about everyone and their fucking dog to Texas, which just compounds it all a little more.

And then my friends die.

And my heart hurts.

And my best friend tells me to stop waiting around for company to come and do X or Y with me, and to just go and do it. Why are you waiting? She asks. I have no idea, I answer.

And I’m reminded that my fallen friends don’t get to do anything any more, and they probably left a to-do list a mile long when they both passed away.

Perspective.

Do I really want to waste the time I have left on this earth?

Can’t I find things I enjoy doing here, and try to find gratitude and happiness in the small things, even if my heart hasn’t yet adjusted to this place?

Can’t I use the strength and techniques that got me through two international expat assignments in Houston and Pune, to get through my time here?

What have I done in previous places that I’m not doing here?

Exploring. Hobbies. Socializing. To name but a few.

So, on Friday morning, after my chiro adjustment, I had every intent of driving home and sitting at my computer working for a couple hours ’til it was time to pick up Lewis from school. But my car had other ideas. It took me to one of my favourite spots around these parts. I got to sit at the waterfall in Glenoe for a little bit, doing some meditation, focusing and grounding myself.

On my way home, I spy a café I’ve been told by approximately 300 people is amazing and that I simply must try. I’ve been waiting. What for? I have no idea, but it hadn’t yet come to pass. So I said screw it. Actually I said, I need to pee and I’m hungry. And in I went. It was the most expensive single-meal I’ve probably ever had in Northern Ireland and i’m not 100% convinced that it was worth it, but I did it.

And tonight, I went back to the O for a hockey game. I enjoyed every last moment of it and am already planning to attend every 4pm Sunday game that’s on their schedule from now until March.

For those of you new to the blog, you won’t know my history with hockey. The Mighty Ducks was my favourite movie growing up. Who am I kidding? It’s still my favourite movie.

I got into Belfast Giants hockey in about 2005 when a pen pal came to visit and the only thing I could think of to do with a Canadian, was take her to our local hockey team. When she left, my brother Rowan and I got the bus to Belfast to attend every match we could, leaving the game early to get the last bus back to Newry from Belfast. (That is, until a local family drove my brother and I to the Odyssey every weekend for the games. Thank you Mallon family!)

I loved games in the Odyssey. I met my husband there. We had hockey themed engagement pictures. A hockey themed wedding. A hockey themed baby announcement when I got pregnant with Lewis. You get the idea. Hockey is big for us.

When we lived in Houston, we went to our fair share of Aeros games. Then our beloved team moved to Des Moines, Iowa and our hockey games suddenly required a 6-hour round-trip drive to watch our AHL nemeses in San Antonio or Austin, or, a 10-hour round trip if we wanted to punish ourselves with Dallas hockey. Then we had Lewis, and our hockey game attendance got less and less. Children are hard, man. India had no hockey, and when we got back here about 10 months ago we went to one game. Turns out that a 7pm face-off, for a roughly 2.5 hour game, isn’t conducive to existence as a 4-year-old. As good as he was, the end result was overtiredness and sleeping in the car – which ultimately meant he wouldn’t sleep when we got home. And yes, we tried giving him a screen to keep him awake, and bribing him with sugar – no, it didn’t work.

I’ve been using the late nights as an excuse not to go to hockey. Turns out? The Giants have a 4pm match one Sunday in every month. Tonight was that game. On a whim I told Col to snag tickets. We went, we loved it and I’m booking the next ones in my calendar. Lewis enjoyed it, he was engaged, he asked questions about the game and he wound me up by cheering for the Panthers, but he’s excited to go back, too.

Why did it take for a friend I’d met through hockey to die, before I asked Col to book tickets to go and do something I loved?

I don’t really have an answer for that.

But what I do know, is that it won’t be another year before we’re back in the O for a Giants game. And I’m already making a bucket list of things to go and do, by myself if I gotta.

Because life is too short not to.

Thank you Sarah, for getting me back to something I love. There’s nothing quite like the smell of a hockey arena, or watching a puck sail towards an empty net when the opposing team’s goalie has been pulled in the final minutes of a game you’re winning. I’ll miss both you, and Joy, but as long as the two of you keep kicking me in the backside to keep moving forward, I think I’ll be alright.

Because life is too short not to be.