MultiCOOLty interview

I’m coming out…

I originally wanted those words to be my title. It’s catching and misleading, which means it is perfect to get your attention!
However, it is only partially true. I’ve been rather somewhat secretive as to who I am here on this blog and where I am in Germany. There really are no recent pictures of me, or my face posted with this blog. I’ve purposely attempted to make my private self at least somewhat separate from my online self. However, I have created an About.me profile and I’m really coming out of my shell, as it were.

A few months back the folks over at MultiCoolty asked me if they could interview me as an expat living in Germany.

I jumped at the chance since MultiCoolty’s tagline is “One country, hundreds of nations, thousands of stories” which they really live by. The website chronicles expats personal stories, in their own words and the result has been, at least in my opinion, ranging from sweet, touching, critical, and amazing. In other words it remarkably (and successfully) runs the gamete.

As the MultiCOOLty website says:

“Every day in Germany we meet plenty of people from all parts of the world just like us. Bright and inspiring people who bring their cultures with them making Germany more diverse. So the idea of multiCOOLty was born as we see how Germany increasingly becomes more multicultural and global. We want to provide a glimpse into the lives of multicoolty Germany. We take pictures, collect short stories, quotes, jokes from people we meet on the streets of various German cities.”

In all honesty, having a new son-who isn’t necessarily all-too-new anymore, has made writing tricky for me. I find it to be such an outlet for ideas and observations. When Eve sent me the questions after my initial excitement, I completely forgot about them for about a month or so. Then, remembering that I was once so excited for the opportunity to be a featured story on the website I finally sat down with the questions, thinking that I could write my response in about a week.

Haha…No.

I had to write Eve back and apologize for answering the questions at such slow pace. As it turns, what I had initially read as simple answers were not so simple. At least not if you I wanted to answer them without sounding like a stereotypical tool. Of course, this is why the features are so good, it is the simplicity of the questions, because there is really more to them than meets the eye thus allowing the interviewee an opportunity to really explore and explain the answer for themselves.

Well, Eve asked me about eleven questions and in response, I wrote a flippin’ novel! Seriously, my responses took up five pages. FIVE PAGES!

The thing is, sometimes this expat living thing is not so easy, even in a country like Germany that doesn’t necessarily feel that removed from my original one. As I have said before, some days I feel like we aren’t on an entirely different continent away from family and every thing familiar, it seems more like we’re perhaps in another state or a distant province in Canada (say like nearer the East Coast). Other days it feels like we are in Siberia-stereotype intended (but no offense meant to those who are from or live in Siberia). With this interview, I wanted to be honest

The idea is that, well we must be living an extraordinary life, and in some ways we are. My husband and I are living out dreams of ours on a daily basis. We have decided to do what our hearts wanted rather than what we thought our heads wanted but are still living our every day lives. On the tough days that do happen it is easy to forget that in a moment of frustration. That living through our hearts first isn’t easy and can make us more vulnerable, but at least for now we know that we won’t wake up on our death beds wishing we had followed more of our dreams and less of “what we were supposed to do”. I think it also might teach our son a good message too, that life is meant to be lived-even in the daily goings on.

So, you should popover to MultiCOOLty to read my interview and then stay to check out some of the others, meet some people and find a new blog or two to enjoy in the process.

I may post the parts of the interview that didn’t make the cut as a post or two on my own blog, since I did write so much. We’ll see about that.

Oh, and you are also welcome for the picture of me, and you actually get to meet my son too. We’ve been trying to protect him from an online life for the most part, at least until he can have  more of a say in it which is actually quite tricky in this age of technology and being an expat. Unfortunately, I take most of the pictures, I am not necessarily in them-so, the image featured was one of the better more recent ones of me, even though it was during one leg of a 24-hour-journey to visit America, and not the beginning either.