Here’s the latest round-up of May on the Move, an Instagram writing initiative created by author Catriona Turner.

Prompt: Friends

One word: Vulnerability.

I’m an introvert, albeit an extraverted one, meaning I can crank up the “I’m friendly and approachable and ready for new people” volume when I need it (and boy, have I needed it during my many years as an expat). However, the big smile, approachability and openness don’t exactly scream vulnerability, do they?

I’m a very intense person who abhors small talk and superficiality (blame the Scorpio sun and Cap rising). Plus, as much as I find people and their quirks fascinating, I require huge amounts of alone time, essentially to recover from other people. This doesn’t exactly help when you move and want to meet people who you, ideally, want to turn into friends.
So, as Catriona explains in her video, I’ve often suppressed parts of my personality simply to fit in and lure people in so that I would not be alone in a foreign place. It’s not a good recipe for making friends. Acquaintances, yes, but not necessarily the depth I crave in a friendship. I have less time for acquaintances as I get older.

I’ve found that these days I’m more in tune with what actually works for me, and it’s this: I no longer seek to please, to suppress, to dazzle just to convince people I’m worth knowing. I try to do what’s always been hard: I show my vulnerability. Meaning I admit I don’t know something, I ask for help in a new place, I talk about feeling lonely or upset. I cancel meetings. I might divulge something more unusual or “wacky” about myself early on with new people, and then I watch their reaction. Some run. Some ask more questions. Some grin, and I know there’s friendship potential. 


Prompt: Forward

This word almost feels like a punch in the gut, at a time when everything from politics to health to education feels like it’s going backward. But maybe that’s what makes it an even more important word to think about.
Forward. If you’re like me, someone who likes to look backward a lot – at times too much – to make sense of the world, moving forward can often feel quite scary.
But it’s precisely that scariness we need to conquer. We need to be more forward. We need to fight the backward forces, so that we can move the hell forward. Let’s push, push, push with all our might. Let’s use the backward glance to learn, from history and from past mistakes, to propel us forward and to resist those who are trying to move us back.

Prompt: Levity

Oh, this prompt! How the f$*k can anybody feel levity these days?
Lightness, especially of heart, seems out of bounds.

I’d say it’s one of the most essential ingredients in life. The ability to feel levity. To see humour even in darkness.
Levity is a good tool to fight despair.

Some days, when I’m looking at funny memes or photos of loved ones on my phone, feeling a sense of levity and ease, and my news notifications come in and lay themselves over the image I’m so happily engrossed in, dropping bombs like “20 people killed during an attack…”, “children in Gaza starving…”, “Vance tells Germans to vote for the AFD…”, I want to scream as my feeling of levity dissipates and I’m grasping emptiness.

And yet it always comes back. I find levity every day. I make a conscious effort to find it. More often than not, it finds me. My pets make sure of that.

These images are all things that have made me feel a sense of levity in recent days:
Image 1 is my dog helping us get the grill ready for our Saturday bbq.
Image 2 is my dog in his favourite spot (I don’t know why he does this but I have a gazillion photos of him in this position, the fold is always elaborately different).
Image 3 is my cat following me through the garden, making sure I don’t go anywhere without him.
Image 4 is my mum’s hands trying to maneuvre some particularly messy Basque food.
Image 5 is the cake I made today for my daughter’s 19th birthday (she’s on another continent but in our family, we still eat cake in the birthday person’s honour, to feel levity instead of sadness).

Sometimes I wish I could levitate.

Prompt: Flow

“Flow” is one of my favourite words. It sounds beautiful; both soft and powerful at the same time. I like how my mouth feels when I say it.
I like wearing flowy clothes, as opposed to tight-fitting things or stiff fabrics.
Flow means movement, but not just movement; it implies freedom and abundance of movement as opposed to rigidity and stagnation.
When things flow in life, it feels good and natural.
Sometimes flow doesn’t happen naturally; a lack of flow shows us that we need to change things so energy can flow freely again. Those moments are very individual – my flow isn’t the same as your flow.
There is no point fighting the flow–you have to go with it, even if it sometimes feels scary.

Prompt: Resilience (+Layers, Laugh, Curiosity)

I’m kind of cheating here, trying to combine all the remaining prompts in one.

“Resilience” – this word usually makes me want to run the other way. But I realised it’s the perfect prompt to combine the remaining #motm2025 prompts I haven’t got round to addressing, so here I am!

I’ve been called “resilient” so many times, and it always baffles me, as I generally feel the exact opposite inside. I guess I must have developed some sort of resilience because I’ve moved so much AND I’m still alive and telling the tale. In fact, it’s something I write about in my upcoming memoir…. Don’t forget to sign up on my website to keep up to date with important news about its publication!

Resilience isn’t something that happens overnight. I feel it’s something that you achieve by working on all your layers – adding layers when and where needed, stripping away layers where they inhibit growth. Usually, it is during those times when you feel you’re bare and need more layers that you build your resilience like crazy.

What helps me build resilience is maintaining my sacred trifecta: Courage. Curiosity. Humour. It’s when you can laugh at life and at yourself and keep your curiosity alive. Both of these build courage. Without courage, there’s no resilience.

Whenever I feel my curiosity about life waning (admittedly this doesn’t happen often), all I need to do is take my dog into new terrain. Watching, or rather, stumbling along at speed behind him when we’re on a new trail and he wants to try every single option possible, his curiosity almost too powerful, ears cocked and eyes wide open, I follow his lead and get everything flowing again.