5 minutes later we were looking at each other, saying, "Huh."
"Huh" took a couple of hours to turn into, "Let's do this!"
"Let's do this!" took a few days to turn into a whole mix of emotions, including such gems as,
- "It'd mean learning a foreign language we know nothing about."
- "I'd have to get a new job."
- "It'd be so much fun!"
And the one that was probably biggest issue for me:
- "I can't imagine ever becoming Swedish, or identifying as Swedish, or raising my children to identify as Swedsih"
Not being able to imagine myself as being Swedish was what finished the idea for me - I also didn't want to be the stereotypical British immigrant - living in a foreign country and only ever eating fish and chips and reading English newspapers and never integrating into the host country's culture, so Sweden didn't seem like it could work.
But by then I'd been bitten by the bug. I wanted the adventure for our family, and I wanted to get out of an increasingly hostile Britain. It was about that time when I started to really feel in my comfort zone at work as well, and I realised that professionally I needed a change to make sure I kept growing.
So I started looking at Canada. The language barrier wouldn't be an issue and having lived there before, it wouldn't be so unfamiliar and scary. Perhaps more importantly, Thales has an office in Canada, so there was a possiblity of getting an internal transfer or secondment there.
So I pursued that line for a while, and things were looking pretty good until we came up against the immigration blocker. We looked into how we could get around it, for a bit, until one Sunday in January this year.
Fjärilseffekten
It was a small moment - I decided to download Duolingo. I didn't have any specific goals in mind, I just thought it would be fun and a better use of my time while out with my phone than Reddit.
It asked what language I wanted to learn. I looked down the list, added French and German (the languages I studied at school), and then, the fateful moment. Such a tiny moment, so seemingly insignificant. But what an outcome. In that tiny moment, I saw the option for Swedish. I thought, "why not?", and I got started on the first lesson.
Half way through the first lesson I was wholly and irrevocably hooked. Duolingo is great fun and really pulls you in fast, but much more importantly, no sooner had I started learning it, than Swedish had become my all-time favouritest language.
Swedish sounds beautiful, and the grammar is great. It's really simple and straightforward compared to a lot of the languages I've learned. Its common family history with English means there are a lot of links between the two, and that made the first steps more fun for me, spotting the common words and grammar. I'll probably post more in future about my forays into Swedish!
So as soon as we started learning the language, Esther and I just seemed to straight away go back to "Let's do this." Later the same day Esther got Duolingo and started learning Swedish, and we started casually looking up stuff online about life in Sweden.
Sverige
It didn't take long before we realised this was going to be the best thing ever. Again, there'll be more blogging on this later, but everything we've read up about Swedish culture fits Esther and me pretty perfectly. The landscape in Sweden is some of the most beautiful in the world, and the climate is perfect - basically similar to England but with snow in winter. Professionally Sweden looked like a great idea too - Stockholm is a really buzzing tech hub at the moment, with loads going on there.
Within a week or two, we were totally hooked, and knew we wanted to do this. In fact, I was so in love with the idea, so quickly, that I started to question it all - it seemed far too good to be true, and like the grass was so much greener on the Swedish side. I've always heard that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. I started to specifically look for downsides, and I found a few. But they were small, and insignificant compared to the positives.
Jobbjakt
So in a short time, we were fixed. We knew we had to try this, or regret not trying it forever. I started looking for jobs, and after a few iterations to get my CV right, I got a lead, for a consultancy called Mirado. I'd never considered a consultancy before, but the more I thought about it, the more perfect it seems. Professionally I knew I needed to do something significantly different from what I was doing at Thales, or I'd risk being typecast my whole career. Mirado fit the bill perfectly. Plus, they genuinely seem like an amazing employer, that really values and promotes their employees' development.
What shocked me though was how fast things moved. I sent my first applications in mid February, and heard back about Mirado near the beginning of March. I was figuring I'd take a couple of months to get any leads back, and then I could wait a while from applying to phone interviewing, and then a bit of time to hear back before going for an in person interview, and then a bit more time before hearing back and getting an offer, and I might have to repeat the whole process a few times before actually getting an offer that worked. I was anticipating the whole process taking a few months, so if it all went well we'd end up moving in the summer some time.
It didn't work out that way.
I went from submitting the application to Mirado on the 3rd of March, and I got my job offer (after having been through three Skype interviews and three in-person interviews) on the 30th of March. They wanted me to start as soon as I could - so I asked for 6 weeks. 4 weeks notice at my current job, and a couple of weeks to move and settle in before starting work. Even then I was panicking wondering how we'd get everything done in six weeks.
Verkligheten
And now - here we are. Two weeks from this moment, we'll be sitting in a house in Stockholm. I'll probably be a bag of nerves - first thing the next morning I'm due to give a presentation to the whole team at Mirado!
But what an adventure. The last time I was this excited about a change was when Esther and I were getting married. People keep telling us how brave we are. Maybe that's true, but I don't really see it that way. Yes, there's a lot that's scary, and we are going to be far outside our comfort zones, possibly for a long time. We'll be alone, in a foreign land, starting a new life from scratch. We'll be forced to grow like no time before in our lives.
Jag kan inte vänta.
