By Caitlin Kelly
Once you’ve changed cities, towns, states/provinces, let alone countries a few times…you can feel quite deracinated, literally un-rooted.
My therapist (oh, that NY cliche!) is from South Africa. Like me, she came to the United States as an adult, and returns to her native country when she can.
Every time we do, we confront our “parallel life”, the one we might have had if we had never left. How (more? less?) successful would we have been? In Canada, with smaller, tighter professional networks, likely…one former university friend now runs the CBC. Another was the speechwriter for the Governor General.
In New York, I have a pal who was the speechwriter for a New York governor, his brother a best-selling novelist. A woman I idolized there professionally at 26 and a writer whose work I read when I arrived are now…Facebook friends. My much shorter reach in the U.S., socially and professionally, came as a real shock to me. I don’t desperately care about it, but it’s very different when your home country has 10 percent of the U.S. population!
I’ll be in Toronto for eight days starting this weekend, and seeing old friends who have never lived elsewhere, apart from one outlier whose wife told him the marriage was over — while they lived in Indonesia.
The elegant lobby bar of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel
I never loved Toronto, my home city, one very much of home ownership, whose expensive, often run-down rental properties are a real thumb in the eye of those of us forever outbid on any house we even tried to buy. Today even the ugliest tiny teardowns sell for — no kidding — $1 million or more. They’re of a size and quality you might consider paying $300,000 for if you were generous. By the time I left at 30, I was restless. If I couldn’t buy a home and settle, time to go!
The city has gorgeous parks and some terrific culture, but after 25 years there I was hungry for change.
Being (cough) opinionated and direct since my teens — neither applauded as politely Canadian — would likely have foreshortened my career since there are so few major cities. I’d already lived in Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver didn’t appeal. So I was lucky to get a green card and legally emigrate to the U.S.
But, oooof, it’s not easy! I’m glad I came and have achieved many of my personal and professional dreams in New York: published 100 times by The New York Times, two books, a lovely second marriage, an attractive apartment. I felt I would likely not have achieved most of these had I stayed in Canada.
I recently did a podcast and one of the questions asked about my romantic life. It was messy and complicated in my 20s since I knew I wanted to move to New York eventually , which meant always dating Mr. Right Now and never Mr. Right, a potential life partner who wouldn’t be able to go with me or probably wouldn’t want to.
So that romantic frustration was another spur to keep moving. He had to be out there somewhere! (I met my first husband in Montreal, introduced to me by a friend there. He was from New Jersey and soon to move back to the U.S.)
Like most people who stay and thrive, most of my Toronto friends are doing very well professionally, have raised families, bought property. Some still head north to their family cottage, some arriving by boat. It’s deeply Canadian!
I don’t even know how to drive a motorboat…
When you leave your native country behind, you also leave behind the former you…the younger, more hopeful, likely more naive version. That’s part of leaving — if you were so delighted by home, you’d stay.
But you do get to spend more time with the people who “knew you when” and can revive some lovely memories. A very dear friend from high school told me last year he had been struck by how “progressive” I was, even at 17.
I recently had dinner in Manhattan at the legendary deli Katz’s (the one from “When Harry Met Sally“) with a younger writer who lives in a small Florida city. She finds NYC a source of creative energy, which I agree with. I told her that living/working in New York City (even though I live nearby) forces you to be fearless, whether dating, driving, looking for work or seeking friendships. Holding back and shuffling your feet there gets you nowhere!
I admit it, I like that element. Sometimes you have to leap, however terrified, to grow and change and hit the heights you seek. I always find very quick shared connection with people — at any age — who have uprooted and lived (sometimes very far) far away from their early homes. That forced adaptation, I think, opens you up to all sorts of new possibilities and identities — staying in a place where “everyone knows you” can feel a bit stifling after a while. I know I never would have studied interior design in Toronto, which I adored, as I did in New York City.
It happened to me at 25 when I spent a fellowship year in Paris.
That’s me in the stripes, around age 8, for a magazine story on kids cooking
I’m definitely a smarter, wiser, tougher version of myself for having moved to New York; as my lovely (second!) American husband has said to me whenever I get wobbly: “Now is not the time to be Canadian!”
When I visit Canada, I do have to dial it back, or apologize for being the “bossy New Yorker.” The things I’m proudest of in NY don’t really register with my Canadian friends, who don’t know these people or haven’t had to compete at those levels. That sometimes feels painful.
The “what if?” question is one I suspect haunts every immigrant, but especially if you’ve had the luxury of leaving a civil, thriving place, not fleeing war or persecution.
Have you changed homes a lot?
Do you have a “parallel life” elsewhere?
Broadside 