Two and a half months ago, I turned fifty.

Michael threw me two parties. One was with my family and friends who could be bothered to make the trek out there, out in the wild forests of East Sooke, with a wheelbarrow full of pink bubbly and photo reprints of me at various life stages placed in scavenged frames around my aunt and uncle’s property, some on trees, some on a cart my aunt likely uses at the market to sell her sugar cookies. There was a Mason jar with little bits of brown paper for people to write things for me, about me, fold up the bits and stuff them in the jar for later reading. It’s on the shelf in the bedroom, read.

The other party was at the property down in Lower Sahtlam, not Upper Sahtlam, and it was mostly the neighbours from around the block (as it were). I was amazed in both instances that anyone came. This is not a declaration of contrived humility. I am genuinely surprised when people notice me, tend to me, recognize me, celebrate me. In both cases, they did, and I walked away with gifted bottles of many red wines of good vintage and a fine sparkling wine from Cathy the Potter.

I am fifty now, some weeks after those forest celebrations. Still fifty. I don’t know what fifty should feel like, as I still feel wildly unformed, unprepared, unrefined. All adjectives will come in threes, my hat trick thesaurus.

I am fifty, and leading up to it I had in my mind a vow, like WWLIC (when we live in Canada) when we were still in Vietnam and making lists about who we could be once we landed in Canada. WIAF? When I am fifty, I’ll get my shit together. I’ll make time for art, for reading paper books, for adventure, for rest, for resetting the bad habits of my first half century.

I’m not sure what I hope to achieve. My skin will age, day by day, and my hair will grey, day by day, and I’m never going to reclaim the energy and vibrancy and possibility of my past years, back when I thought I wasn’t good enough. I often feel like I’m a ghost of me, looking out of my current physical iteration, constantly surprised to exist, to have form and substance. I have a body! And it exists in the universe! And it’s on the groundrush toward the end of sentience! Shit.

I’m fifty and I’m going to quietly write here while I figure this out.

Husband and child in tow, I landed first at my parents’ house, then in a tiny studio flat on the campus of my surprise new university job. Four months later, we are in the forest, in the house I grew up in, the house my parents built when I was a toddler.

After 25 or so years of living in vast, sprawling cities, far, far away- as far away as my impulses to dive into the unknown and unexpected could take me– I have landed with a thud back into the same rural, spartan architectural framework I walked away from at 17.

Here are a few things that we don’t have out there, in the woods at the bottom of the river valley, half an hour from the nearest town, an hour from my job:

• cell phone reception
• street lights
• sidewalks
• shops, cafes or amenities
• public transportation
• traffic of any sort

Here are a few of the things we do have:

• bears, deer, elk, cougars
• a perverse density of very tall trees, mostly fir or similar
• a loud nightly chorus of frogs
• sticks
• puddles
• a river accessible from several directions
• some neighbours, scattered, many with big pickup trucks

About a year and a half ago, when we first started putting together plans to leave Saigon, we coined the term WWLIC (pronounced wihwillik)- When We Live in Canada. It was shorthand for all of the things we wanted to be, to do, to make, to imagine, to fathom— as soon as we could get out of Saigon, out of the mad traffic, out of the never-ending Masters’ degree, out of the crowded, moneyed, ambitious Phu My Hung, the affluent Asian expat neighbourhood in south Saigon, where we had spent the past three years dodging SUVs and teaching largely pleasant but directionless rich kids.

WWLIC.

We used the term with increasing frequency and urgency.

I mentally compiled lists detailing how I would become a better, more creative person WWLIC

I would learn how to make fancy macarons (grinding my own almond flour! making filling from my garden’s own fruit!), run 10k regularly, learn another language (not under duress), grow heirloom chilies and tomatoes and tomatillos and brew up amazing hot sauces (to sell in the Saturday morning market alongside the sprout and soap people), walk and cycle everywhere.

There were intimations of lavender fields and honey bees.

I would sleep and wake at reasonable times.

I would be calm and patient and rested, reaching out to long lost friends and family.

There would be dinner parties and cafe dates.

I would read novels again. Proper paper book novels. Smart novels.

I would stop feeling exhausted by unmotivated students or ridiculous drivers.

I would recognize and appreciate the amazingness of a well-regulated social system and formal driver training.

WWLIC I would become my idealized better self that had been put on hold for decades— because I was fully convinced that it was this, that, or the other in Vietnam or China or Turkey or wherever that had limited my potential as a grown up person.

It was the traffic, the students, the one-year work contracts and precarious work permits, the language barriers, the cultural differences, the impermanence of it all. I was a temporary person for my entire adulthood and had fully absorbed the implications of this, skidding over the surface, looking around and thinking, oh, gosh, when I settle down, I will learn to do this or that, I will invest in this, commit to that.

WWLIC.

Come the realization of WWLIC, I’m still in that temporary mindset, categorizing life by school terms, by the year, by the contract. I see ends and deadlines where I should see an expanse of time, of possibility. I secretly doubt the notions of permanence and stability.

Everyone warns you about reverse culture shock when you return home after a reasonable chunk of time living away. I’m not experiencing reverse culture shock. Canada is pretty much as I left it twenty five years ago, and that’s fine. I remember how to live here, how to speak here. I remember the limitations, the pleasures, the privileges, the frustrations.

The things that annoy me now are the things that annoyed me in the countries I used to live in, but I had dismissed them as cultural quirks exacerbated by culture shock or the lingering remnants of cultural discord that I had yet to resolve. I’m still annoyed by traffic, for example. Instead of 15 cortisol-rich minutes on a scooter through Saigon traffic, I now drive an hour to work, quietly cursing tailgaters and aggressive guys in oversized trucks, full-beams blinding me at 6:30am. Apparently driving in general bothers me, not just the chaotic, indifferent rivers of vehicles in Vietnam or the aggressive Shanghai taxi drivers or the bold, brash Turkish ones.

As the months back home increase in number, however, I’m increasingly surprised by my own actions, reactions and interactions. It’s no longer about my outsider status in a country that I temporarily reside in. I genuinely have no more excuses for not doing all of those bettering ideas that had been brainstormed and carefully collated in Saigon.

Four months in, I’m still not sure how to talk about coming home.

This is Nanaimo in the snow. This is one of the many bear-frequented trails that run above and below and alongside our little temporary Yew (tux wa’culhp) cottage on the campus of Vancouver Island University, where I’ve somehow found myself working. I get paid to put the ass back into assessment.

This is not Saigon. This is not Vietnam. Nope. This is the unseasonal winter in the far, far, south-westernmost corner of Canada. I have returned home at last, the inevitable prodigal daughter slinking back to her home island after a few decades out in the densely populated urban wilds of Asia major and Asia Minor, with husband and small boy in tow, ready for trees and emptiness and silence and duvets and log fires.

About three months ago, after just over four years in Vietnam, we journeyed from the suddenly beachless beach town of Mui Ne (global warming, typhoons, etc), where we had been hiding out since we quit our jobs and flat at the beginning of December, to the airport in Saigon to Japan to Vancouver to Victoria, and set off a chain reaction of a very unseasonal season of nearly constant rain, snow, wind and storms. Since we arrived, we’ve manage to drive up and down the island endless times, ferrying me between my distant job and my family two hours south, repeatedly outracing the worst XYZ storms in the past XYZ decades. Rain, wind, snow. We beat them all.

In a week or so, we will be moving into my long-empty childhood home in the forests of the Cowichan Valley, an hour southwest of Nanaimo, where cell phone signals still cannot reach. Michael and Thwack are busy priming and painting and tidying and my father is rebuilding the bathroom (burst pipe, wet walls) while I work away at academic matters at the university. The air is warming slowly and slightly, and the warning bells of imminent springtime are tinkling away- hey, birds and buds and rays of sunshine! The storms of the past few months have stopped (for now) and the promise of a massive new adventure looms curiously on the horizon. Our Masters degrees are finally done, we aren’t stuck in an exhausting huge city, and we have all the time and space in the world to do…something.

We’ll let you know what that something is as soon as we’ve figured it out. It’ll be massive, I tell ya.

For now, the Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai is at its most impractical, ever.

Waves hello after a ridiculously long absence.

Istanbul cafe days, with books.

Ten years ago, approximately, I left Istanbul, and along with a city that I loved/loathed, I also left behind a lot of books.

By this, I want to absolutely emphasize that this was a heartbreakingly vast quantity of books that had slowly but steadily grown in number over my six years in Turkey, and which had kept me company in cafes, on long bus trips into Anatolia, during long winter evenings and weekends in the days before I actually had internet access at home. Yes, I didn’t even have internet at home until 2007.

I read a lot of books, paper books. No Kindle, no ebook, no tablet. Books from Pandora kitabevi, from Robinson Crusoe, from Homer, from Greenhouse, from the used booksellers in Kadikoy, from the tiny little shelf of really random English books in that department store in Kayseri.

Istanbul kitaplar

I loved my bookshelves full of beautiful books. I used to kneel down (because the book case was low to the ground, and deep– probably a china cupboard in a previous life) and look at their spines, remembering each one, feeling frankly calmed by their presence in my home.

And, yes, when I left with two suitcases and a cat in a patent leather bag, I gave almost all of the books away.

And I mourned their loss for years. I told myself to not be so materialistic, to be more appreciative of the ephemeral nature of text. Whatever.

It still hurt.

In Shanghai, the book carts selling plastic wrapped fake books replenished my shelves there. I had ALL of the Murakamis, ALL of the Mievilles, ALL of the Keyes, all of the nerdy non-fiction I could lay my hands on for 15 kuai a pop. When I was in Cambodia, I bought all of the books from all of the beggars.

When everything exploded back in 2013 and I found myself suddenly adrift, those books were lost, left behind. I didn’t have the energy to negotiate them back. The few I smuggled over to my next flat, deep down in Xuhui, were handed out to whoever wanted them when I left China for good six months later.

Byeeeeee, Shanghai collection (or fraction thereof): the blurry phone photo from my FB post giving it all away

If I had a bookshelf- a real one, a big one, a wall-sized one like I’ve seen on Pinterest boards- I would fill it with every book that i have loved and lost, arranging them in chronological order, compartmentalizing all of the million chunks of my life that had been discarded, moved on from, partially or wholly forgotten. Those books I left behind in guesthouses in Eire, in Guatemala, the ones I traded for lesser ones in Nicaragua, the ones I gave away, the ones I forgot to take with me (they were under the bed). 

Which have you left behind?

I think I’d like to kickstart a series of posts from all of you guys who have told me about your bestest books. The ones keeping you company now. The ones you’ve remembered. The ones who messed with your head in your 20s.

If you fancy, send me a list of 6-8 books that you’ve loved and lost and a little something about them. In the comment section, or email, or Facebook. Whatever.

Let’s get a conversation going. I really enjoyed the last one.

Go on, then. Let’s talk about books for a change.

They’re definitely excited to be going on an excursion to the seaside.

About a year ago, probably longer, I announced that I would be revisiting the 100 Happy Days challenge.

You know the one- you post every day for 100 days something that made you feel happy, no matter how small, how fleeting.

I totally failed. And I am not exaggerating: this post was last saved on the 24th of April, 2017. It’s now April of the following year.  It’s been sitting in my drafts folder, untouched, since then. 

I have, admittedly, opened it up every few months to potentially finally write it but failed. The words just weren’t there.

I’m not going to do another 100 Happy Days challenge, so the title and introduction to this post are misleading. It’s not that I don’t want to focus on the good, on the lovely bits of sunshine and unexpected smiles and moments of elusive joy. No, no. The thing is, those 100 day challenge things need documentation, they ask for photos that oyu can learn how to click from Andrew Defrancesco, for posts, for some sort of tangible proof that a thing was good. I don’t want to feel like I need to take my shitty old phone out to take a picture of… what?… a particularly pretty beam of light, a nice bún chả, an intangibly pleasant day?

I’m really burnt out on posting. My desire to be public, to write at the world, to display my minutiae, to present 100 days of tedious tiny details to a media-saturated audience, is really piddly these days. Hence the fallow blog. The radio silence.

However.

However, the theory behind it is valid. Noticing the lovely moments. Emphasizing the good bits. And that’s where this post is coming back to- but just once, and not 100 times.

For the past decade, probably two, maybe three, I’ve been a moody, restless, fickle, frustrated, melancholic, self-critical person who has created a life of movement, change, unnecessary challenges (etc, etc- you know the routine) to feed those impulses. It’s been a very interesting ride so far, but looking back from the vantage point of a tired 43 year old who has spent 24 years drifting around with intent, I can see now that I made some choices that allowed me to completely neglect options that might have actually done me some good.

Things I need to start migrating back toward.

About a week ago, I submitted my final assignment for my final taught module on my MA course, the last bit to slog through before the dissertation. Since September of 2015, along with living in a country that challenges me and who I think I am as a person to the core, along with trying to raise a decent little boy, along with working in a job that challenges me on waaaay more levels than I’m paid for, I’ve been studying, relentlessly. Like, at night, on Sundays, before work. Writing increasingly complex papers on things I’d never even heard of three years ago.  

It has been exhausting. I’ve barely had time to read for pleasure much less de-clutter my mind, getting rest and calm as needed. 

It has been demoralizing. I now know very clearly all the areas in which I know too little or nothing at all.

It has been personally bewildering. I’ve been so busy with the mad triad of work/study/parenting that I have totally neglected (forgotten?) the things I used to think defined me (travel, writing, photography, art, creativity, etc). I have been turning inward more, curling up for a quiet bedtime read when time allows, rather than doing anything out there. I’m a bit disturbed by how little I’ve wanted to do anything beyond my tiny little well-worn path. 

All those things eat away at the 100 days of happiness.

Those are the things that allowed this post to languish in my drafts folder for so long. 

I want to quietly turn a corner, to start reintroducing myself to a slightly wider world, to something more balanced. 

A bit more of what I’m pretty sure I am but haven’t had the time or energy or inspiration to be for a long time.

Which is a crazy vague statement, but I haven’t actually quite articulated it to myself yet. 

Books I’ve been reading. Books that make me happy. Books that are inspiring me, motivating me, quietly easing me out of my inertia and malaise. 

I thought about starting up a book club to talk about these books that have been clogging up my Kindle but, frankly, I’m not ready for that much humanity yet.

Can we talk about books in the comments?

What can you recommend to a gal who can squeeze in half an hour at night before falling asleep?