I usually don’t review books here, but I just read the book What Alice Forgot and felt so impacted by it I had to share. The premise of the book is this woman (Alice) who falls and hits her head at the gym which results in her forgetting the last 10 years of her life. Pretty interesting right? Well, I don’t know for other avid readers, but eventually most books start blending into each other; however, the way that this book explains how much we can change over a period of time – basically into someone we don’t even know, is memorable.

Throughout the story, Alice is being told about the person she is today, as well as some occasional flashbacks. Her last memory is of her being pregnant for the first time and being happily married while 10 years later she has 3 three children and is getting divorced. You also get a glimpse of how her relationship have changed with family and friends; all to her surprise. So, even though it’s completely understandable why her life isn’t as it was 10 years before, I eventually started to sympathize when Alice says things like ‘how could we be getting a divorce? We are so committed to making this work!’ (not an exact quote). I was also touched with how she struggled to figure why she and her sister, as well as some friends were not as close as they used to be. There are certain times in your life when you feel so sure about everything and everyone in it that you can’t imagine anything being different. But then of course, life happens.

Expat life is synonymous with change. If I hit my head and temporarily lost the last 10 years of my life, I would wake up thinking I had just graduated from college, had started my dream job in Haiti and was planning my upcoming wedding. As much as I had my future planned out then, it ended up something quite different. Some of the actors have exited the stage and the stage set up is definitely not how I imagined. Others have gone from a starring to a supporting role. But, like Alice (without the head injury), I have to pause and appreciate all the scenes that have played out and learn to embrace last minute changes in the script. I have to trust that in the end, it will be a masterpiece. My masterpiece.

For anyone who has ever wondered how and why your life has become what it has, What Alice Forgot will get you on the path to those answers

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.  ~John Archibald Wheeler

You know we expats are always talking about how different our lives are from friends and family back home. We describe how our schedules have changed, how we manage our homes differently and of course how we eat differently. With the start of school (yippee!) and hearing about everyone else’s changes and transitions, I noticed that our lives are so much more alike than I had previously realized. It’s fragile. We have happy times, sad times and bored times. Also, everything can change in 24 hours.

From hearing about a Facebook friend who realized how much her life had changed since her last status update 18 hours before, to reading about people who are affected by another sudden tragedy; people’s lives are in constant flux. This is true whether you’re rich, poor, living abroad or living in the same place you grew up. Someone once made the analogy to me that life is like when you’re in the bathtub with a bunch of floating balls and you’re trying to keep all of them underwater. Right when you’ve got all of them under control, one pops up. Sometimes the ball that pops up can easily be handled with a slight maneuver. However, sometimes getting a handle of it means letting go of all the others. Regardless of a person’s exterior circumstances, which is basically what living abroad is, dealing with sudden changes can be very difficult. Traumatic even.

So, I’ve decided that next time someone is asking me about how different my life must be living abroad, I’m going to remind them that we go through the same emotions as everyone else. I’m living a life very similar to theirs; I’m simply doing it at a different geographic coordinate.