3 ways you know it’s time to go

A few very basic frameworks to help you make decisions

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

My dad worked as a high school history teacher and basketball coach for 37 years.

Dad’s job had a few perks, one of which was having access to the school on weekends.

When I was elementary school-aged, we’d walk over and let ourselves in.

He’d go grade papers in his classroom, and I’d shoot hoops in the gym.

I was on-edge going between Dad’s lit classroom, with its black-and-white portraits of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, and the big, echo-y basketball court.

I thought about how full of life, loud and crowded, these dark and empty hallways must have been on any non-summer weekday.

After 90 minutes, I was weirded out and ready to leave the century-old school.

That leave-early way of thinking stayed with me into young adulthood.

For me, nothing good happened at a party after midnight, so my default setting was Irish goodbye. I’d slip out just before the atmosphere reached peak-nonsense.

At university, I bartended part-time. Dealing with drunk folks was the hardest part of each night, and I fought the instinct to just walk out as each night wore on.

The bar was in a big old house. People said it was haunted.

I couldn’t get out the front door fast enough when we locked up at 3 am.

I’ve lived in a few different places. One of the challenges of living far from home is that you can’t just pick up and leave when you want.

It’s not like being in an old school with your dad or at an annoying teenager party.

Here are a few very basic frameworks I’ve used to help me make decisions about when it’s time to go:

1. Ticking the checkboxes

My parents visited once during my four years at university. They came a month before the end of my academic career there.

Mom was grossed out by our living room floor. “Do you guys even own a broom?”

I looked out the large apartment window onto downtown and said, “I’m going to miss this place.”

Dad said, “Just stay then.”

I was shocked.

Just stay?

I’d had a checklist in my head all year:

• finish your degree

• work as many shifts at the bar as possible

• see live music in small venues whenever you can

• spend every other non-asleep moment hanging out with the fellas

With just April to go, I’d almost ticked all those boxes.

After my parents left, I thought hard and came up with two reasons to stay:

• my girlfriend, two years younger than me and still going to school

• the bar, a place I loved and had worked at for 3 years

Was I making a new checklist?

Then a third list, this one detailing why it was time to go, worked itself up my head:

• just about all my friends were leaving

• very soon, I wouldn’t have a place to live

• significant student loan repayments started in 6 months

• I didn’t want to be “the older guy”, living in the basement of my girlfriend’s house and going to parties only to reminisce about the recent past

This third list made it clear.

I lived in a university town, and I was no longer in university.

It was time to move on.

2. Weighing the pros and cons

When I’d first arrived at university, my attention was grabbed again and again by papers sticky tacked to windows, taped on elevator walls, and pinned onto corkboards throughout my residence advertising the adventure of teaching English abroad.

China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all beckoned.

To see Asia, all I needed was an undergraduate degree.

Now that I’d done my four years at university, and I had a fancy piece of paper with my name on it, I went to work with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at a daycare in South Korea.

Life in Korea was rarely boring.

I had a free apartment just down the street from where I worked, was quasi-kidnapped while getting my work visa in Osaka, went to the Demilitarized Zone, sent back money to pay off my student debt, and took the high-speed rail to Busan.

I ate school lunch with my students every day.

They eagerly watched as I folded myself in two to get into the child-sized seat, knees level with my ears, and tried to eat rice and spicy kimchee with flat metal chopsticks, tears and snot running down my face.

It’s incredibly humbling to be laughed at by 5-year-olds because you can’t eat properly.

There were parts about living in South Korea I didn’t like too.

In a class with four 3-year-olds, Thomas, youngest of the group, stood on his seat, pulled his pants down to his ankles, and started waggling himself back and forth.

Once, when I was bent over a desk helping a student, the class clown rammed his two index fingers into my rear. “Dom-shim!”, he laughed.

I worried I’d always be a kind of sideshow for my students and not taken seriously.

Then, out of the blue, there was a wedding abroad I had to attend.

Dad was going to have major elective surgery.

Foreigner culture was drink, drink, drink, which wasn’t for me either. After seven months, I wasn’t enjoying myself as much as I once had. There were better, higher-paying teaching jobs in Asia, at actual schools, but I needed a teaching degree.

I weighed the pros and cons.

The cons outnumbered the pros. It was go-time.

I broke contract, did a runner, and returned to Canada to get my teaching degree.

3. Thinking long-term

Taiwan was the first place I went after becoming a certified teacher, and I thought I’d be globetrotting for a decade to different teaching jobs around the world.

I ended up staying in Taiwan for 13½ years.

Unlike South Korea, I no longer had to teach very young children.

I worked at an actual school, too.

Part of the deal was that, again, I was provided with free housing, so I was able to put almost my whole salary towards paying off my student debt.

Within a few years, it was gone.

My time in Taiwan was mainly good. I worked at two different schools, one of which was International Baccalaureate (IB), met my future-wife, got married, had a daughter, and went back to my Canadian hometown in the summers.

Then the pandemic hit.

Taiwan was a year behind the rest of the world because, as an island, it had effectively closed itself off for all of 2020.

The government introduced all kinds of rules, like having people always wear masks outside, forcing us to use tracing apps, and closing public parks.

The silliest protocol was telling recreational swimmers at public pools they must mask-up as soon as they exited the water.

Factoring in the price of stays at “quarantine hotels”, we could no longer afford to fly back to Canada each summer.

It became impossible to develop any continuity with my students. We’d come to school and do a half-day in-person, someone would test positive, everyone would be sent home, we’d do 3 days remote, then reconvene on Friday for hybrid classes.

No deep learning was taking place.

Most of the world started opening up, but Taiwan was sticking to its rules.

The freedoms I’d taken for granted were being withheld, at least in the short-term.

I was getting antsy.

With life on pause, all I could do was think long-term:

• Was being a teacher in Taiwan, where the fertility rate is 0.87, a good idea?

• How would Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party affect the island?

• Would we ever be able to afford to buy an apartment in Taipei?

• What else could I do in Taiwan, besides teach?

Looking forward, I thought it was time to move on, for the sake of a better long-term future for our family. We’ve taken some short-term hits, but it’s relative.

Use a checklist, weigh the pros and cons, think long-term.

If you’re deciding whether to stay or go, one of these very basic frameworks will help.