Hey heyyyy friends (and lurkers),

Yes, I’m alive!

First off – I need to tap into my innermost Canadian life force, and say the biggest possible ‘sorry’.

I know that an unannounced year off social media typically gives off “she got ran over by a tractor” vibes, but in this particular case, it was more like “she was busy making wonderful life changes” vibes, which is far less dramatic… and a lot less comical.

But yes, life has been treating me well, and I’m here to give you the lengthy overdue update that nobody asked for.

To sum up the delightful chaos of my accidental time off, around this time last year, my boyfriend and I decided it was time to finally move away from Munich, a city we’d both called home for over 5 years. 

We made this move around Christmas last year, so as you can imagine, the 2nd half of 2021 was pure chaos. 

I wish I had a dramatic story to tell you about how this decision came to be, but the truth is simply this: after 1.5 years in lockdown, walking literal marathons through the streets of Munich, and bumbling down pretty much every lane in a 10km vicinity, we felt this weird sense of contentment… Like we’d gotten everything we needed to out of Munich, and knew it was time to move on.

No drama, just a strange sense of sudden clarity. Bundled with my visa being up for renewal, it just felt like it was time.

This clarity carried through when we began to think of the next step.

Should we become full-on digital nomads and go all around the world? Nah, the pandemic aged us far too much for that to work. Was it time to settle down, buy a house, and consider offspring? We didn’t feel ready for that quite yet, either… nor did we know where exactly we’d have said house or offspring.

We’re both lucky to be working in jobs that allow for remote work, and even luckier that we’re both unhealthily obsessed with each other’s home countries….

So we committed to a simple plan: 6 months in Canada (my home country) and 6 months in the UK (Sean’s home country), a brawl of bases pitting maple syrup against clotted cream, icy mountains against cottage-specked hills, and “eh”-centric accents against “innit”-eresting ones… with a hope that by early 2023, we’d know where we wanted to move next.

After 6 glorious months in Vancouver (my hometown), we’ve now started our 6 month trial in the UK, with London soon to be our base after some trips around Europe.

So by now you might be wondering “okay that’s cute but why did you ghost all of us for a year?”

First, let me say that I really didn’t mean for it to drag on to a full year, but there are a few different reasons for my accidental year long absence. The most obvious being that personally, it has been a year full of wonderful chaos and change. 

My break initially began because restrictions had lifted enough that I felt okay finally visiting loved ones in the UK, and also visiting Canada for the first time since the pandemic, both things I wanted to be fully present for. So, I innocently logged off while I frolicked and hugged and reunited… 

This is how I spent my August – November.

With all my overdue reunion hugs complete, I flew back to Munich in November to officially ‘move out’.

Turns out, when you’re panic packing and flitting continents and colouring your carpets in with Sharpie so you can get your deposit back (true story), posting boomerangs of your face becomes less of a priority.

So, I kept telling myself (pretty much on a weekly basis) “I’ll get back to Instagram once things calm down”.

But that’s a funny thing about life: things do not, I repeat they DO NOT ever, calm down.

There’s also the matter of global events.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but the past year (or three, really) have been an absolute dumpster fire of horror and tragedy, with one terrible event dethroning the next in a seemingly endless cycle of misery. 

Imagine strategizing how to make your Instagram comeback when suddenly, Russia invades Ukraine. Or brainstorming about how to share your travels again when women around the globe are mourning the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The bleaker the news got, the more frivolous my social media contributions began to feel… so I’d wait again, hoping for an opportune time when things felt a bit more ‘normal’.

But much like how life never calms down, the news also never gets any more normal. Conquered a global pandemic? Here’s a war! And inflation! And an energy crisis! And a new pox that’s named after monkeys.

I’ve always thought of my role on social media as a simple, unimportant thing: to be a silly Internet gremlin that makes people smile through travels and the occasional dumpling-making timelapse. That’s it. And when the world entered a state of endless turmoil, that kind of content felt even worse than unimportant – it simply didn’t feel right to be posting and producing.

So I kept telling myself, a break is fine. 

I just really, honestly, did not expect that break to keep stretching out for a year.

And so, a year later, here I am, pleading forgiveness for leaving you all hanging.

I mean, some of you thought I was dead, which wasn’t great… but then came the never-ending guilt cycle of thinking “Ah! I should really get back to it!” but then thinking you owe everyone more than just a “oh hey, what’s up – haven’t seen you all in a year” but then overthinking that, and blowing every single detail out of proportion.

Such is the life of an overthinking aggressively introverted people pleaser… 

So all this overthinking led to a funky mush of inaction and avoidance.

To the graveyard of DMs I’ve been to anxious to open, I am so very, very sorry.

I’m really lucky to have people around the world (most of which I’ve never met before) worried about me, and I should have been better with (at least) letting everyone know I was fine.

I just kept overthinking the best way to do it, when really a gif of me shimmying with a thumbs up and platter of cheese probably would have done the job.

Now some of you might be thinking: “Isn’t Instagram your literal job?”

And if it was, wow I would have been fired SUCH a long time ago. But no.

Confusing as it might sound (and trust me, I’ve tried to explain it ad nauseum to all my friends and family), social media is only a tiny, somewhat insignificant sliver of my business.

There’s a million and one ways bloggers monetize their businesses – many rely on brand deals and sponsorships (which often hinge on a social media presence), but others like me earn money through ads and affiliate commissions on our websites, which rely on nothing more than having a website, and driving traffic to it.

I realized long ago that the fuss of brand deals wasn’t for me. Something about the endless negotiation and obligation made me run for the hills. I found much more contentment simply writing helpful articles, and waiting for the traffic to roll in.

So doing the math, if the end goal of posting on Instagram was brand deals, and I hated doing brand deals, then any time spent on Instagram was… unpaid labour, pretty much? Just for fun?

I think you see where I’m going with this. 

Sometime over the past year, I realized how easily I could still do my job, enjoy my life, and not share anything at all.

Free from the pressure of ‘being on’ all the time, and keeping up with social media algorithms, I’ve spent the past little while scaling ‘Happy to Wander Media Inc.’ from a single travel blog with my face plastered all over, to a full-on media company with almost twenty, largely anonymous websites under its umbrella. I have writers! I have a set salary! And I get to work in my pyjamas!

All this has made it less important for me to focus on my personal social media profiles.

Add on the uncertainty of travel over the past while, and I just had no motivation to post anything travel-related, both due to lack of financial incentive, and also because I felt weird posting about travel at a time when many still couldn’t, or didn’t feel comfortable doing so.

But it’s 2022 now – the world is opening back up, people are travelling again, and for the first time in years, I actually feel good about posting travel-related content.

So, what’s next?

Truth be told, I have dozens of adventures sitting in my Camera Roll, waiting to be shared. I also have an exciting six months ahead, with lots of travels planned that I think many of you would enjoy seeing. So, hello! Here I am again!

But since social media is (by design) not a critical part of my business, I will be posting in a more deliberate and purposeful way, with my focus still being on my websites and (soon to be resurrected) YouTube channel, with social media more as a fun, creative space on the side.

Maybe this is a niche introvert thing, but I’ve come to realize that I always found social media draining because it’s a consistent barrage of social interaction.

As a textbook introverted personality, I’m someone who needs DAYS to recharge my social battery after big gatherings, and social media deprived me of any recharge time, which is why even the most basic things (like posting the occasional story) began to feel like a monumental chore. 

… But when I’m in one of my ‘social media is wonderful’ phases, it does bring me a lot of joy to craft content in a way that’s helpful, entertaining or (gulp) mildly inspiring.

All that to say – a happy medium exists somewhere in there. I just haven’t found it yet. And I guess between packing up my life, moving continents, planning my future, and trying to enjoy every moment, the last thing in my mind was figuring out how to find it.

So if you’ve stuck around this long: thank you. I feel like you’ve just plunged into the terrifying cave that is my overthinking brain, so if you’d like to now back away slowly, feel free.

But I hope this long, rambly mess helps you understand what I’ve been up to this past year, and why I’ve taken this year away.

And finally, to those of you that are like “woah – didn’t even notice you were gone” – thank you. That kind of reaction would bring me great comfort… because at the end of the day, this overthinker would like to believe that you’re all keeping tabs on me far less than I imagine. 

I’ve been yapping for far too long now, so I’ll end it here. I hope you’re ready for my giant face to take up your feeds again sometime soon. We have a lot of catching up to do.

See you soon,
Christina 

PS: Weirdly, I’m writing this now from Munich where I’ve decided to come back for a few weeks to enjoy Oktoberfest (the first one since 2019!) In a way, this felt like the perfect time to make my social media comeback, and say a proper goodbye to the city. Excited to share more soon!