2023 life in the uk

At the start of 2023, I was thinking about what I wanted from another year of living in the UK. I had been ill for nine days, so the immediate ambition was fairly modest. Stop being sick. Have enough energy to do something other than lie on the couch. Then perhaps tackle the bigger questions.

I had been here for seven years, and I still loved my life in the UK. That didn’t mean the year ahead was straightforward. There was another visa renewal to face, a passport about to expire and the usual questions from people who seemed very sure they knew what I would do next. I also wanted to try things I hadn’t done before, both for myself and for Adventures and Naps.

Wanting to stay didn’t make renewal less frightening

2023 was a visa year for me. My visa was due to expire, and renewing it filled me with dread. I found renewal slightly less frightening than applying for a new visa, but there were still costs and a deadline to think about. I expected to talk about that process later in the spring. At the beginning of the year, it was a hurdle still ahead of me.

My Canadian passport was also due to expire. I had never renewed it while living abroad, and I hadn’t yet worked out how I would do it from the UK. That was another thing I needed to figure out. When people asked why I didn’t simply get citizenship, my answer at the time was that I wasn’t eligible. I thought I probably would like to do it eventually, but it was a possibility for much later.

Some messages were far more certain about my future than I was. People had told me I was obviously only in the UK to make videos and would inevitably return to Canada. I found that wild. Going back was always an option. I was Canadian, I liked Canada and my family was there. But I didn’t know what my eventual decision would be, so I wasn’t sure how strangers could claim to know it for me.

At that point, I didn’t feel an overwhelming urge to leave. I loved Canada and I loved the UK. I wanted to stay here as long as I was allowed. My first five months had been extremely difficult, but afterwards I had felt much more at home and at peace. Life here wasn’t perfect. I was still happy with it.

I also knew that wasn’t every person’s experience of moving abroad. Adjusting could be awkward and difficult to talk about, and I wanted to keep being honest about that. If someone gave life here a real try and remained unhappy, I hoped they could feel able to go home. Staying suited me then. That didn’t make it the right answer for everybody.

I wanted to keep making things

Adventures and Naps was continuing in 2023. I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted the YouTube side to look like, but I was interested in experimenting. YouTube had changed since I started, sometimes in disappointing ways. It could be disheartening, and I had seen channels stop because making videos became too stressful or frustrating. I was proud that I had kept going.

The community mattered to me as well. YouTube was one part of it, but Twitch and Patreon were a large part too. At the time, I livestreamed twice a week, playing games, doing crafts and hanging out with people. I loved that community. Patreon helped keep the work going financially, and I was grateful to the people who supported it.

I wanted to try new formats and topics without drastically changing the whole channel. I was interested in playing around, even if an experiment didn’t work particularly well. That was what I wanted for myself too. I didn’t have a finished plan for every new thing I might make, but I was excited to keep trying.

Habits made more sense to me than resolutions

I didn’t like setting New Year’s resolutions. I thought it was too easy to announce one, do nothing towards it and then feel terrible when it failed. Instead, each year I picked roughly three habits I wanted to build. Sometimes I worked on the same ones for several years until they became part of daily life, then chose something new.

Reading more was one I felt I had finally established. I had wanted to spend less time on the internet and more time reading, and I had worked at that over the previous couple of years. For 2023, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. One specific step was signing up for a weekly yoga class. I had only tried yoga once and found it interesting, so I wanted to give it a couple of months and see whether I liked it.

That meant doing an unfamiliar activity with people I didn’t know. After some trying and exhausting years, I felt ready to put myself out there, explore and learn without worrying so much about failure or looking stupid. I couldn’t promise nothing bad would happen in 2023, but I was excited to get going. First, though, I was going to lie on the couch and have a nap.

Watch my plans and hopes for life in the UK in 2023.