The visa itself wasn't the hard part. The hard part was everything happening around it — the house, the school transition, the job search, the emotional weight of an international move landing all at once.

Since living in the UK, I’ve found myself re-examining parts of my upbringing that I never questioned before, especially my education. Not because it was “bad,” but because so many of the assumptions baked into it simply don’t survive contact with the wider world.