Tag: Resilience

Open Skies to the Pacific Northwest

by pennypostcard • April 16, 2023 • 2 Comments

As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 post, last year was a big road trip year for me.

I took five major U.S. road trips and one European road trip in 2022, racking up over 22,000 miles as a solo driver across five countries and 28 states. And that was after a relative lot of road miles during the years since we’d returned from our second diplomatic tour in Australia already: in 2019 we drove over 2,000 miles through Hawaii, followed by California, Oregon, and Washington; in 2020 we moved by car from Virginia to Mexico and once we were settled took a jaunt up to Alamogordo, NM; and in 2021 I crossed the border on smaller road trips both alone and with my husband to Las Cruces, to California and Arizona, to Carlsbad, Cloudcroft, San Antonio and Fort Worth, and Albuquerque.

Apparently the driving didn’t get old, because last month I was ready to jump back behind the wheel and drive all the way to the west coast by myself again.

Foreign Service, U.S.

New Year, New Scenes

by pennypostcard • April 13, 2023 • 1 Comment

At the beginning of 2023, I made a commitment to spend more time during the months of January and February hiking in new places. There are so many parks and trails in northern Virginia I’ve never seen despite having lived here for eight years off and on.

The new year is always a good time for me to get motivated about a goal, cheesily enough, and I think exercising outdoors in the cold feels better than during the hot, humid times as Virginia marches from late spring into summer.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2022 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • April 12, 2023 • 1 Comment

For me, 2022 was a profoundly strange year, filled with ups and downs. We finalized adopting our cat and moved from Mexico to Virginia, I succeeded in my 100-lb weight loss goal, took a road trip to Florida, started my fourth tour in Washington, DC, and visited the west coast three times in one year. I got promoted, saw my favorite band live, took fun beach trips with my husband, and took a family trip to Europe. But I also was knocked off-center by the traumatic death of an old friend, struggled at times to learn my new job, and dealt with illness – both my own and that of multiple family members.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

First Christmas “At Home” in Eight Years

by pennypostcard • March 30, 2023 • 3 Comments

If we were to discuss what sucks most about the Foreign Service lifestyle, the majority of Foreign Service Officers would agree missing holidays or special occasions with family back home ranks near the top of the list.

Last December I went to the west coast to see my parents for Christmas. It marked our first Christmas holiday together since 2014 when I got a few days’ reprieve from full-time, mandatory Russian language training and flew with V to my mom’s for Christmas. If someone would have told me back then I wouldn’t come back for Christmas until 2022, I would’ve been dumbfounded.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

On the Road Again: Coast to Coast

by pennypostcard • March 29, 2023 • 3 Comments

As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 roundup post last December, I not only drove by myself from northern Virginia to the west coast in June, but also in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I left at the end of a busy work day the Thursday before the holiday, fighting my way through rush-hour traffic on the beltway to get a head start on my journey.

And as usual when you’re trying to leave the office for a couple of weeks at a time, I had an active international parental child abduction case with two children returning to the United States from Venezuela in-progress that very afternoon. Thanks to the help of my excellent colleagues, I was able to track the return up until I needed to walk out the door, and then hand the case off to my backup. As I crossed my first mountain pass in Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies against pelting snow, she worked to monitor the landing of the children’s flight in Miami and update our leadership on their reunification with the left-behind parent. When I finally checked into my motel in Ohio and caught up with my work emails very late at night, I was elated to see all was well that ended well. Fortunately for me, my road trip went just as smoothly.

Health, U.S.

Mental Health is Health

by pennypostcard • February 28, 2023 • 4 Comments

I’m continuing to catch up with blog posts from a few months ago to bring us to the present day. September 2022 marked one year since the death of my longtime friend T who I met in 1998 and who was my boyfriend off and on for a few years while I was in college. It hardly seemed possible a year had elapsed, since I’d only learned in April that he’d already been gone for seven months. It still felt new and unfathomable to me. In an attempt to find answers and process his passing, I’d gone to California in May and visited his grave, worked on a memorial plaque, and found lots of books and podcasts about suicide and grief.

In honor of T’s life and September being National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, I tried some volunteer activities I’d hoped would help me feel like I was doing something that mattered. I couldn’t help the one person I really wanted to try and help, so maybe I could help someone else. But I slowly began to understand I couldn’t “action” away my grief with memorial or suicide prevention activities, nor did “grief brain” allow me the ability to take on a lot of new information or tasks. As time passed and my shock wore off, I actually felt worse as people were expecting me to start feeling better. I saw I needed to take a step back to process. Because grief is an individual journey and everything you feel when grieving is normal and OK, even if it doesn’t meet others’ expectations or even your own.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Who’s Who at Main State: A Scavenger Hunt

by pennypostcard • January 29, 2023 • 2 Comments

Last fall, our team in the Office of Children’s Issues paused our regular international parental child abduction casework and bilateral portfolios for a daylong retreat. In addition to team-building exercises and an in-depth examination of our processes to see where we might improve internal coordination and workflow, we also took a 10-minute walk over to the main State Department building near 23rd and C Streets in northwest Washington, DC.

Balkans, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VI: Dubrovnik to Sarajevo via Mostar

by pennypostcard • January 7, 2023 • 1 Comment

The morning we departed Croatia, we said thank you to the beach house for the wonderful memories. We were sad to leave the coast, and drove alongside it until we began to ascend into the mountains. We had taken the road to Dubrovnik’s north rather than to the south, in order to stop for lunch in Mostar – a city none of us had visited – on our way to Sarajevo. The total distance would be around 165 miles; however, drive time minus stops would be close to 4.5 hours given the mountain roads.

Not long into our journey, before we had even crossed the Croatia-Bosnia border, we saw smoke off in the distance. Initially we didn’t think much of it. But as we continued, it became darker and more ominous, and soon after we ran into a forest-fire related roadblock and detour. The detour wasn’t well-explained by the gruff policeman, and took us a fair distance off the Google Maps path we had launched before leaving beach house wifi – slightly alarming since we were navigating without live internet. However, A saved the day with an offline Snapchat map, something I hadn’t even known existed since I haven’t opened my Snapchat app for eight years. (I know.)

After we jumped that hurdle, we then had a slightly not-so-hilarious situation with one of us, who shall remain unnamed, needing a bathroom where none existed within binocular range of the Bosnian border. After idling in the weeds and hoping inquisitive soldiers wouldn’t appear at any moment and ask us what the hell we were up to, we made it across afterwards without further incident.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Road Trips 2022

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2022 • 6 Comments

I’m not yet ready to publish a reflection on 2022 as a whole, but as we get ready to welcome 2023, I added up my 2022 solo/sole driver road trip stats and was amazed.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Foreign Service Promotions: 10 Things I’ve Learned

by pennypostcard • December 28, 2022 • 5 Comments

In 2022, I received a promotion as a mid-level officer. It makes my head spin a little trying to figure out how to explain the Foreign Service promotion process to someone outside the FS, particularly to private sector folks who would likely expect diplomats’ promotions to be based on a complex set of 360 reviews, impressive projects, and reputational factors. (Pro tip: They’re not.) I’d like to share 10 things I’ve learned since I joined the Department in 2014 as a Foreign Service generalist about getting promoted (or not!)… I’m going for lay terms, but you be the judge.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Blurry Summer

by pennypostcard • December 20, 2022 • 4 Comments

I am months behind in my blogging. We are somehow now less than two weeks from the end of 2022 and yet – writing life-posts chronologically as I prefer to do – I’ve most recently only written about my May/June road trip to the west coast.

As I have dealt with personal and family illness, workplace disappointments from Juárez, the January curtailment halfway through my Mexico tour, and confusion from the suicide of an old friend for most of this year, this blog has not been the platform to write about some of the darker grief on my mind. I’ve had good blog posts in draft for months, on topics from our late summer trip to the Balkans, to getting promoted in the Foreign Service, to a follow-up to my wildly popular post about Foreign Service housing, all in various stages from partly-done to mere sketchy outlines.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Our First Foreign Service Pet, Part I

by pennypostcard • October 30, 2022 • 6 Comments

Many Foreign Service families have pets, and spend a significant amount of money transporting them around the world on one diplomatic tour after another. It isn’t easy or cheap to move pets between the United States and a foreign country of assignment, let alone to commit to doing so every 2-3 years. Between airline customer service, the stress of an international move (often by plane) with pets, complex shipping and courier requirements, vet paperwork, foreign country import and quarantine regulations, extra vaccinations, and the EXPENSE often stretching well into the four figures, it can get very stressful. Not to mention if you have elderly or special needs pets who don’t travel or relocate well, you may decide the best thing is to leave them behind with a friend or relative, if possible. And there’s always the worst case scenario: a large-scale crisis at a post where pets are not guaranteed a space on a limited evacuation flight out.

Some types of pets are generally more practical than others in this lifestyle, too – namely cats and smaller dogs. Of course, there will be officers who find a way to make it work for a time with fish, hamsters, and humongous dogs – in my view, adding more worries to an already complicated life. But the prevailing thinking seems to be pets are worth the hassle and complications posed by a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move because of all they add to your life during calmer times. I was happy to forego that benefit until our most recent tour in Mexico; there we finally acquired our first FS pet, more than seven years into this lifestyle. A combination of seeing how much my husband V loved the animal, being on the border where all we had to do was drive home to the United States when we left our post, and knowing we wouldn’t have to move by air for at least three years all pushed me over the edge. After all, we can’t just live every day in the tight box the Department draws around us, even when coloring outside the lines makes it harder.

Health, U.S.

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month: What Everyone Should Know

by pennypostcard • September 11, 2022 • 4 Comments

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month in the United States, and September 4-10, 2022 marked National Suicide Prevention Week, an annual campaign to educate the public and promote increased awareness about suicide. On a personal note, one year ago this month an old friend and someone important to me took his own life, so I’d like to use this post to discuss suicide awareness. Suicide is a heavily stigmatized topic many people avoid and consider taboo. But it’s not a contagious disease. It touches so many of us and is getting harder to ignore.

In fact, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), in the United States in 2020, there were almost 46,000 reported suicide deaths; a shocking 53% of them were firearm suicides. During the same time period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports an estimated 12.2 million American adults contemplated suicide, 3.2 million made a plan, and 1.2 million Americans attempted suicide. (The true figure could be much higher, since some suicide attempts go unreported.)

Stop for a moment and consider the human toll beyond the statistics. How many friends, family members, classmates or coworkers are connected to each of those individuals? The AFSP estimates a staggering 53% to 85% of Americans have been affected in some way by suicide – whether it’s trauma from witnessing a stranger’s suicide, coping with losing a loved one, or suffering with suicidal thoughts themselves. You may know someone like this, or this may be you. So if you’re wondering whether you can do anything to help, the answer is yes. And I’m asking you to try. Suicide prevention is officially everyone’s business.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Go West, Part IV: What About Your Friends?

by pennypostcard • September 6, 2022 • 1 Comment

In mid-June, after leaving California, I spent almost a week in Washington state teleworking and otherwise helping out my dad during my stepmom’s hospitalization. In late 2018, they had made their relocation from California to Washington permanent, selling their primary home outside Monterey and moving the last of their things north.

After enjoying the uber-green surrounds plus the most alone time I’d had with my dad in years – wonderful, but a sad result of my stepmom never being released from the hospital during the duration of my visit – it was time for me to start heading towards Virginia and home. “Back east,” as west coasters say. My dad and I checked the Volkswagen’s oil and kicked the tires, and then I set off on my first leg for Idaho.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Go West, Part III: Social Media is Disconnecting Us All

by pennypostcard • August 31, 2022 • 3 Comments

After driving cross-country like an arrow in under four days, I arrived in my hometown on the last day of May and sat at my friend T’s grave. I then spent half of June teleworking from my mom’s house in California, and later made my way up to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom before turning the wheel back east towards Virginia and home.

I didn’t take much leave during my three-week road trip west. The deal I’d hastily cut with my office had been to work remotely from California so I could spend time decompressing with family while not leaving our team in the lurch. I did, however, voluntarily and consistently work on east coast time. I aligned my schedule with my colleagues’ by signing on at 5:00 a.m. west coast time, taking my lunch after my family arose for breakfast, and signing off by 2:00 p.m. Thus I was free relatively early each day to enjoy some sun and do whatever else I wanted. That mainly involved spending time with family and old friends, sitting quietly in the cemetery, or visiting places I had memories with T where I needed to be alone and process my grief.

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