Up sticks to the USA - Pt. 1

It's safe to say that moving across the world isn't easy, especially if like me you were a complete homebird for most of your life. At the time of writing, ten months ago (time flies), I married my incredible wife Shereen and upped roots from Belfast to Portland, Oregon in the good ol' US of A.

There's no one size fits all solution on how to approach this transition, but being a designer at heart, I was keen to solve and share the intricacies of my experience.

It is worth prefacing this post with the fact that all of the below would have been impossible without the love and support of my wife Shereen, you need a best friend if you're going to do something like this, and like the milkman - she delivered.

Getting here

In early 2018, I made the decision that I was going to take the plunge and make the move and after looking at all the options, we chose the K1 as our visa of choice. What is the K1? Simply put, it allows a non-resident to enter the States and marry a US citizen.

From initial application to approval, the process takes around a year and costs around £4000. A lot for a piece of paper you say? There are a a few steps involved, filing the forms is just the start, one of the main costs is an overpriced medical exam which can only be done in London. You are also required to attend an interview to go through your application (also in London). This sounds daunting at first, but to be perfectly honest I found the questions from the Immigration Officers in the airport a lot more probing!

If things go to plan, once this is all done, you'll receive a package in the post 2 weeks later with your visa and you're good to go.

No turning back

Once you arrive in the USA, there's no turning back. K1 is a single entry visa, meaning if you leave the country you can't get back in. With all that considered, once Shereen picked me up from the airport, we decided the most sensible thing to do was take a trip up to Yakima, Washington (a beautiful drive FYI) adopt an 8 week old shepard-mix puppy and name him Archie.

Adjusting status

The main stipulation of the K1 visa is that you get married within 90 days of arriving in the USA, so we got ourselves a retired judge, took the dogs, met up with our friends Blair and Caleb in Laurelhurst Park and said I do.

Now I could adjust my status, aka get my Green Card. Doing this allows you to not only stay in the USA, but work here and travel freely. My advice to anyone is to do this all as quickly as possible, it takes up to 6 months and costs another £1000.

Re-establishing a routine

One of the best things that I found helped me settle in was re-establishing a routine. Writing this is a bit of an oxymoron because my routine was a bit everywhere before moving, as I essentially spent 3 weeks in Belfast then 3 weeks in Portland for the guts of about 18 months.

To be honest, I found getting back into a "normal" routine a real challenge, that's because everything had changed. I beat myself up a little over this for a couple of weeks because I was used to being hyper-productive when I sat down to do work, whereas I was now getting easily distracted.

I found the key to overcoming this was applying one of the main design thinking methodologies - empathy. Realising that this transition was normal and would take some time to adjust to, allowed me to free up some headspace and ultimately led to rediscovering how to be productive again.

Next week...

That's all for now, next week I will discuss how I began putting that productivity to good use with clients, the pros/cons I found in working from home again and the importance of work/life balance.