Relocated - for now

In mid-December, I left Iceland. Not forever, not exactly on vacation either. Not with a concrete plan, but a loose one. Flexible to my needs and desires.

Basically, being in Iceland was getting to me. Between the cold and the darkness, and the feeling that I had somehow gotten into an unhealthy pattern of working too much and my only non-work activities being socializing with alcohol or playing the occasional game. Of course there was more to it than that, but I’d gotten unhappy with my lifestyle.

To make matters worse, ever since Covid, I’ve struggled with a number of health issues, related to skin, sleep, and energy levels, and I’ve become very sensitive to the cold. A recent blood test put me at dangerously low on vitamin D despite me supplementing 1000 IU daily.

And, on some level, I had never really fully processed my time in parliament; I’d dived head-first into Ecosophy work, which has been enormously fulfilling, but the old burnout was still there, lurking.

So I went to New York for a bit, and then came to Curaçao.

Wait what?

I came to Curaçao once before, some years ago, and kind of liked it here, but didn’t really have enough time to explore it fully. So when I decided to leave, I figured this would be a good place to start.

I’m not staying here for long. A month or two. But I’m now approaching a month in, and am quite liking it. I’ve got an apartment here for a couple of months, but I’m expecting to go elsewhere by late February at the latest.

Willemstad is a cozy little town, a bit overwhelmed with the trappings of tourism, from overly expensive tourist traps everywhere to overpriced and largely useless taxi services. But once you get out of the touristy areas and settle into regular life, it’s quite comfortable and has a good rhythm.

In terms of health, I’m doing great here. My skin problems have gone away, my sleep is vastly improved, my energy levels are high. And there’s very little and highly opt-in cold here.

While being here has been a significant hit to my social life, it’s also given me a lot of space to think and reevaluate things.

One other weird thing is that I’ve found that things I was doing out of habit in Iceland simply don’t appeal to me here. For example, I used to often stop for a beer or three at my local pub in Reykjavík on my way home from work. Here, I don’t have that habit, and even though there are many nice local watering holes, I find myself gliding past them most of the time – resultingly, it’s been over a week now since I had any alcohol. Completely by accident at first, only now I’m kind of actively curious to see how long I will go before wanting it again. I’m not in some abstinance thing or anything like that, I’m just making a point of not defaulting to beer and seeing what happens.

Publishing!

As part of this adventure, I find that I’m finding my voice again – as evidenced by the existence of this and the previous blog.

But also, a thought I’ve had for years now, to start making commentary videos analyzing various geopolitical situations and such, has finally gone from “that would be nice” to actual action. I’m still experimenting with format and such, but you can find my YouTube channel. I’d love to get feedback on what’s working and what’s not. For now I’m trying to be good about posting something at least once a week; currently doing something closer to twice.

In addition, I’ve been publishing a bit of code too – more on that later.

I don’t actually know if the current pattern is sustainable. It is probably subject to the same highs and lows as anything.

We’ll see how it goes, but at least for now I’m enjoying this process.