Our Next Steps

So I may or may not have had a spectacular meltdown in the staff room at school today at lunch time. I opened up to a teacher about how down I’ve been feeling, which is resulting in lack of motivation to participate in my language assistant program, and that opened up *quite* the can of worms.

Basically we are really struggling financially and the assistant’s salary is not enough to cover one person’s needs, let alone two. We’ve been desperately searching for more work but not getting anywhere, and my homesickness is still yet to abate. Both of us dislike Marseille. In a nutshell: disappointment.

All I really want to do is go home, but I don’t know if that is the answer. We packed up our lives there with the intention of being away, living overseas for an extended period of time. Secondly, with the market the way it is over there, jobs are like gold dust and I can see us struggling there just as much as we are here. There’ll be no hope of being able to pack up and go to a nearby city in the hopes of finding jobs either, because this is Perth and there are no nearby cities. We invested so much energy into coming here, I don’t want to give up now.

In terms of our options post language assistant program though… I keep running into brick walls. Josh can’t work in France due to the language barrier, and he can’t get a visa to anywhere else without going back to Australia to apply for it. I still haven’t given up hope that we still might find a loophole or something that permits him to get a visa for Germany or somewhere else where they’re good at English, but I’m not holding my breath there.

Since I’m a British citizen, I understand I can apply for French permanent residency post Brexit as I’m employed here. This would a, allow me to stay in France and work indefinitely (provided I can, actually, find work), or b, allow me to apply for a visa for another country and work there. Whether or not said work would pay enough for the both of us is, of course, another matter entirely. Obviously, being a British citizen, I can also get work in Britain. Well, when I say “can,” I mean, I have the right to do so, but. This could be a solution, however, my teacher warned me that I would basically be busting a gut working all the time to cover the bills and not travelling at all – AKA the exact same situation as here in Marseille. So, that wouldn’t be worth it either, I don’t think.

You know, Australia is so far away and coming here was meant to be the beginning of a dream that we’ve nurtured and cherished for so many years now, travelling and seeing as much of the world as possible. To go home before it ever really got off the ground would be more awful than I can even put into words. But currently I don’t see that we have anything else we can do.