How the homebody came to be

At almost-8 months of living in the same country as my not-so-new husband, I've finally decided to get moving on starting a new blog to chronicle my misadventures of adapting to life as a homebody.

About 8 months ago I had packed my bags and shipped off the obscene amount of belongings that I had accumulated during the time I lived and worked in Shanghai. From a decent wage earning studio producer who worked with international photographers and directors, I was all set to leave that behind to move to Japan to be with my man.

Of course, this is not all just in the name of love. I had realized that for 8 years, I worked my dream job. But in hindsight, I had also foregone building and maintaining strong and lasting relationships with people. My job took up pretty much 90% of my time, and when I wasn't working, I was going on holidays. Friends eventually stopped calling altogether when they realized that I will never make it to their meet ups and events. Most of the time, I can't even pencil in coffee time.

So when I moved to Shanghai in the summer of '11, I thought it would be a good opportunity to settle down in a new country and make myself some new friends, you know, to compensate for the loss of ones that had phased out when I started working. Through the move, the changing jobs and the settling in, I was pretty stoked to be only 2 hours away from my man, as compared to the previous 7.5 hours from Malaysia.

We had been going out for 4.5 years and we'd spent that time traveling, sometimes he to Malaysia, sometimes I to Japan, sometimes meeting halfway in another country. We registered our marriage 3 days after Christmas '11. Up till then, we'd always talked about him moving to Shanghai to be with me. We spent 4 days as man and wife together before he was due to return to Japan, and I, to Shanghai.

To cut a really long story short, Shanghai didn't work out for me. Or, some people would say, I'm not cut out for Shanghai. So I left and finally worked on the one relationship that was good, constant.

I came to Japan, and the rest, is the future of a homebody.