My first month out here was one of the best months of my life.
I woke up before the alarm every day, which I had not done since I was a child. I worked in the morning and I was finished by 2. I ate things I could not name and liked most of them. In December I walked home at midnight in a t-shirt and laughed out loud on the street about nothing, on my own, like a man with a problem.
At the end of the 30 days I sat down and did the sensible thing. I looked at the evidence. Money in, money out, work done, how I felt on an average Tuesday. All of it said yes.
So I flew back, gave notice on the flat, sold or gave away everything that did not fit into 2 bags, and came out again.
That decision was right. I have been out here 10 years and I would make it again.
The month I based it on was worth nothing. I passed a test that everybody passes.
The advice is always the same. Go for a month first and see if it suits you. It sounds careful. It sounds like the grown up version of throwing your life at a wall.
It is not careful. It is 30 days long, and 30 days is not long enough for anything true to show up.
The money part is the easiest to check, and people still get it wrong.
At the end of my first month I added up what I had spent and got a number I was proud of and repeated to people. That number had no flight in it. It had no health insurance in it, because I had paid a year of that at home in March and it did not feel like it belonged to this. It had no border run in it, because I had not needed one yet. Nothing had broken. Nobody had got ill. No landlord had asked me for 6 months up front, because I was in a room that gets rented by the week to people like me.
It was a holiday budget and I was calling it a monthly average.
The real number only turns up when something goes wrong, and in a good month nothing goes wrong. That is what makes it a good month.
Then there is the work, and almost nobody checks that one at all.
The money that landed in my account in month one came from clients I had won while sitting still. Years of sitting still. In an office, in one city, in bad meetings, and at a wedding where I got talking to a man who gave me 3 years of work off the back of it.
You do not lose that in 30 days. It empties slowly, like a tank with a small hole in it. Month one, full. Month 5, you notice.
Nobody sends you work because you moved. That sounds obvious written down. It did not feel obvious at the time, because the money kept arriving and I kept quietly assuming I was doing something to make it arrive.
And then there is everybody back home.
In month one nobody has forgotten you. The group chat still has you in it. People still send you things. Your mother still describes it to her friends as a trip.
All of that fades, and it takes a lot longer than 30 days to fade. My first birthday out here, everyone remembered. The second one, some of them. By the third I was the one doing the messaging, on the day, at a bad hour, to people who were at work.
The real reason the month lies is duller than money or work.
For the first 30 days the novelty does the job that loneliness would otherwise do.
A bad day in month one still ends with an interesting walk home. The wires overhead are interesting. The way they knot the plastic bags is interesting. The woman with the cart on the corner is interesting. You are never really alone in month one, because the street is loud and new and it keeps talking to you.
Somewhere around month 3 or 4 the street goes quiet. Not literally. It just stops being new. The wires are wires. The bags are bags. And then you find out what your evening actually is, once nothing outside you is doing the work.
Mine arrived on a Wednesday in month 4, in a town I had picked because the rent was cheap.
I worked in the morning. Finished at 1. And then there was the rest of it.
I remember exactly what I did with that afternoon and it is the least dramatic thing in the world. I took everything out of my bag and put it all back in, in a better order. It took 2 hours. The bag was fine. There had never been anything wrong with the bag.
At some point I worked out that I had not said a full sentence out loud to another person in 2 days. I had said thank you a lot. I had pointed at food.
That same week the laptop charger died, and the right one cost 4 times what it costs at home, and I had to do a border run I had been pretending was further away than it was. None of it was hard. It was just the first month where the life sent me a bill instead of a postcard.
That is the month that should decide it. It is not on the trial.
It works the other way too, and I think about that part more than the first one.
There was a man I met in week 2, out for the same 30 day look at the place. He was Dutch, I think. He ended up in the wrong neighbourhood, next to a road that ran all night, and then he got properly ill for 8 days of his 30 and spent them in a room with a fan and a bucket.
He flew home and said it was not for him.
I have no idea whether he was right. He might have been. He might also have been a man who had one bad month, which is a thing that happens in every city on earth, including the one he flew back to. I never heard from him again and I would not know where to start looking.
The instrument gives false yeses and false noes. It is just a bad instrument.
30 days is also, and I do not think this is an accident, the exact length that sells.
It is long enough to sound serious. It is short enough that almost nobody fails. You can build a retreat around it, a cohort, a challenge, a package with somebody waving your name at the airport. Nobody has ever tried to sell you a 90 day trial, and 90 days is the first honest number.
The thing I would actually say to somebody is not worth money to anyone, which is probably why it never comes up.
A month tells you about the place, and that is real and worth having. You find out whether the heat wrecks you. Whether you can sleep through the noise. Whether the food still agrees with you after 3 weeks instead of 3 days. Whether you can stand being the only person in the room who cannot follow the conversation. Go and learn those things.
What a month cannot tell you is the only part that matters, which is whether you can hold a week together when nobody is making you.
You can test that where you are, this month, for free. Take everything off your calendar that you did not put there yourself. No colleagues, no plans somebody else made, nothing happening because it is Friday. Do that for 6 weeks in your own city, where you speak the language and know where the doctor is.
If the Wednesday afternoon in week 6 is fine, you will be fine here.
If it is not fine, it will not be fine here either. It will just cost you a flight, a lease and a year to find that out.
I still think you should go.
I went on evidence that was garbage and it worked out, and I am not going to stand here and pretend I was clever about it. I got a whole life out of a month that proved nothing.
Just do not call it proof. The first month is not the test. It is the part you were always going to enjoy.
Andrew - No Refunds •••