For most of 2018, I considered myself a pretty ordinary guy, living a relatively ordinary life in the middle of America, with a rather ordinary job. I ate leftover pasta at my desk for lunch, I listened to Morning Edition in the car every day, and on weekends I’d watch college football on TV and maybe brew a batch of beer.
But suddenly, my girlfriend’s job offered a foreign assignment. Extraordinary!
To be fair, when I met Sara two years prior, we had bonded over our shared passion for rugged travel and unusual global experiences. When I was in grade school, my family relocated to the U.K. for two years; Sara had spent four years in Peru with the Peace Corps. My first two years of college were at McGill University in Montreal; Sara did Semester at Sea. I spent a high school year on foreign exchange in the Czech Republic; Sara lived and worked on an Indian tiger preserve after college. We’d both been around the block a few times — but as my professional life emerged, those experiences felt more like the old trails of my youth than a path for my future.
Career considerations
For one, I had chosen a career in advertising. It’s not to say that an advertising job can’t be global or mobile, but art directors are a dime a dozen in every time zone. Plus, as cultural navigators, we “commercial creatives” tend to do better in our native environments — or at least, that’s what I had convinced myself. Friends of mine have gone on production shoots in some pretty exotic areas, but a five-day stint on location in Budapest is hardly the same as a relocation. And because I worked for hometown clients with local market footprints, even offers to jet off to the most modest of locales were nonexistent.
For me, the gains of working in a creative field more than offset whatever banality might arise from driving the same commute every day to go sit at the same desk and look out of the same window. And besides, Sara and I had plenty of drive in our personal lives to travel and explore, and that was enough to scratch my itch.
On the other hand, Sara was proving to be a fast-rising superstar in her conservation NGO’s global team. She did travel for work. A lot. Sara was just as likely to be in the Amazonian rainforest on any given Wednesday as she was at her desk in downtown Denver. Though I missed her when she was away, I was OK with the arrangement because it meant I could eat all the junk food I wanted while she was off earning enough frequent flier miles to take us on our next vacation. But, beyond that, I was more than happy to vicariously experience the world through our FaceTime calls.
Our weekends hiking in Colorado’s high country and camping in the shadows of colossal mountains were where our worlds overlapped. Our professional worlds couldn’t have been any more different.
So I really shouldn’t have been that surprised when I got her text asking if I had any interest in moving to New Delhi.
A lot to think about
A predictable sequence of thoughts went through my mind. Holy crap, for reals? Wow. India, huh? Tigers, and chai, and spicy street food, and hot sultry nights. I wanna see the Taj Mahal! And the Ganges! Is there sailing in India? Decent beer? What about good internet? How are we gonna get our stuff over there? Maybe I can bring my electric piano. I guess that means I have to leave my band, though. Perhaps I can find a Delhi bluegrass band to play with? Hmm, I guess I have to quit my job too. But that’s OK, I can freelance and build my own business. Oh, what’s that? It’s illegal for me to do any sort of work at all in India without a visa? That visa is complicated to get? So, I guess I’ll spend all my time doing … hmm. I don’t know.
And so it went, over and over in my mind, from the day that our venture was but a mere suggestion right up until the moment we boarded the plane eight months later. Until the cabin door closed, our journey was all mental fantasy. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I first heard the term “trailing spouse” not long after we arrived on our pre-assignment reconnaissance trip. Sara had found a club called the Delhi Network, which we learned was a weekly social gathering of (nearly exclusively) women and served as a sort of social support and activity group for the city’s trailing spouse community
We reached out in advance of our Delhi visit and were subsequently invited to experience the group before deciding whether or not we wanted to cough up the dues for me to become a full-fledged member. As we entered the swanky lounge at the Hyatt Regency, I began to get the first taste of my new radically different life. And I’ll admit that it made me a tiny bit uncomfortable.
As I introduced myself around the room, I became rather conscious of how the simple act of meeting someone for the first time is a distillation of one’s self-identity into something salient and bite-sized. What is the abridged version of oneself? What is my elevator pitch? As someone who has been deeply career-driven since college, I am accustomed to presenting myself according to my metier. “Hi, I’m Elliott, and I work in advertising,” or, “I’m Elliott, and I’m an art director from Colorado.” And after a few rounds of talking to different women in this room, I realized how uncomfortable I was editing my byline to reflect my new “trailing” reality.
By contrast, these women introduced themselves to me with all manner of interesting tidbits that help define who they are. Not only did they happily share with me where they were from, but also why they were here and what activities and organizations with which they were involved in Delhi. None expressed to me that she was a teacher, or a CFO, or a certified yoga instructor.
Newlyweds in a new country
As we began to settle into our new environment, Sara and I were also settling into our new life together as a married couple. While we had discussed marriage prior to this relocation opportunity, the move really served as a catalyst. At a minimum, this was because our legal status as a married couple was the only way I would be supported by her company and validated in the eyes of the Indian government. But we were also excited to seize this opportunity to cement our commitment and partnership. And boy, what an exceptional shared experience and foundation this was to build that partnership on. But, no matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t shake the emotional discomfort of being unemployed. I felt like I wasn’t contributing financially to our new life, no matter how often I tried to remind myself of the value I provided in helping us navigate and maintain our new home.
One of the things that I knew I had to do as we prepared for this life change was to find something meaningful and creative to do with my time. Despite the nagging challenge of putting my career path on hold, I knew deep down that this two-year hiatus was a once-in-a-lifetime gift. So, on Sara’s first workday in India, I sat at the little desk we had in our temporary apartment and began figuring out how to build a blog.
I researched domain names, blogging platforms, design templates, marketing tools, everything that I could think of to build and grow a site that could serve as my creative outlet and my “job.”
At the same time, I also worked on helping us grow into our new home. Empty walls were soon covered in pictures and paintings from our travels throughout India. We adopted an Indian street dog. We made friends and threw dinner parties. I spent hours walking around neighborhoods, photographing my surroundings. And the blog continued to grow and mature. For all my worrying about who I was and feeling like I was losing a large part of my identity, I realized that my fears couldn’t have been farther from reality. After a few months of life in Delhi, I noticed I had started introducing myself quite differently. “Hi, I’m Elliott, and I run a popular expat blog here called “Living The Flipside.” And then I’d hand them one of the business cards I’d had made.
I was a trailing husband, and I was thriving in my new role. Trailing doesn’t mean “also,” or “because of,” or “instead of.” Trailing meant I had the time to explore, learn, volunteer, write, travel, and make life-changing connections and discoveries that I would never have had sitting at my ordinary desk back in Boulder.
And then came the pandemic…
Sadly, just as we were truly finding our stride, the whole world came to a grinding halt. By March of 2020, we had seen much of what we wanted to see, but not everything. From drives through the tea fields of Kerala, to desert camel journeys in Rajasthan, safaris in Assam, food tours in Calcutta, and archaeological explorations in Hampi, we were blessed to experience as much as we did. But once COVID-19 became a household word, my days of exploring vanished.
We were no longer resident tourists in a magical land. We were locked up inside our house, along with the rest of the country and much of the world. But in our case, as expats, we felt even more isolated; as soon as flights resumed, we realized it was time to go home.
Looking back from the other side
Today, a year and a half after we’ve returned to Colorado, I look back at that time in our lives with overwhelming fondness. I’m back in my original career, growing and advancing, thanks partly to the growth and advancement from my experiences abroad. Surprisingly, I found work within two weeks of being home, and my trailing life — just like that — was only a memory.
Having experienced culture shock many times over in my life, I tried to mentally prepare myself as much as possible for the biggest shock of all that no one ever tells you about: re-entry, or reverse culture shock. But what was even more shocking than that was how easy and effortless it was to transition back to our old American way of life. Perhaps the isolation of the pandemic took some of the “sense of place” out of the equation. Four walls are pretty much the same no matter where in the world you are. Much of the time, the only thing that felt “different” was the fact we had a well-traveled dog and more colorful wardrobes. But every now and then I’d catch myself daydreaming about the otherworldly life that we left behind. And it made me sad to think about how fragile it was and how quickly it could disappear.
So, over the past year, I decided I needed one more project to properly close this chapter in my life. I wanted to have everything I wrote, the photos I took, the lessons I learned, and all the friendships I made in one place that I could always look back on. I didn’t realize it at the time, but producing a book from my blog was a mammoth undertaking. Four hundred fifty-two pages of massive coffee table book later, I now have something to hold, to help me look back through our challenges and joys, and to reconnect and share with my readers, whose encouragement and support made the whole endeavor so worthwhile, meaningful, and fulfilling.
Last week, Living the Flipside was officially available on Amazon (and yes, even Amazon.in), IndieBound, and so many other retailers worldwide. This whole thing is, quite literally, unbelievable. And it makes me incredibly happy, proud, and grateful. I quit my job and moved with my dazzling bride to the absolute other side of the planet. It is because of — not in spite of — this fact that I gained the most valuable thing I will ever have in my career: the knowledge that our identities are what we make of them, that success is up to us to define, and that our best professional and creative achievements can come in any form.
And yes, even if that form looks suspiciously like a phone book and weighs as much as a VW bus.
