I have some rather big news to share today. I’ve been looking forward to sharing it so I’ll get right to it – and for those of you who want to know the hows and whys and buts, you can read on below – but here it is:

I’m moving to Norway this August where I’m going back to grad school.
I’ll be starting a master’s in Theoretical Linguistics this fall at the University of Tromsø.

This is obviously a huge life changing thing – a move abroad is quite an undertaking in any case, and the scale of this one is pretty different than my first go-round (some of you may remember I once spent a year working in Hungary). There are many, many more practicalities to consider, I’m bringing a spouse along this time, etc. But it’s also a huge career shift from where I am at this moment and what I’ve been doing for the last two and a half years.

I’ve spent an immense amount of time in the last year trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. That’s a big question to ponder, and one we never totally figure out – we’re constantly evolving, after all. But it’s a question I definitely wasn’t really ready to answer when I was finishing my BA in Linguistics six years ago. I freaked out about finishing school and applied to grad school at the last minute. I got a Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), a program that put my linguistics background to very practical use and which I enjoyed immensely. I went to Hungary to teach. Hungary was wonderful, but it was exhausting. I decided to head home to Seattle at the end of my contract and give my long-held dream of running my own arts & crafts business a go. And what a go it’s been! But the challenges of being self-employed are myriad, particularly when one’s spouse is also self-employed. Sometimes we just don’t have an anchor, and I’ve struggled with it often. I’m incredibly lucky to have friends and colleagues to lean on for support, and I’m so lucky to have support from every one of you who’s ever sent me a message, knit one of my patterns, taken a class, said hello at a conference or trade show. It’s an incredible thing to make a job out of a passion, and I’m happy to have done it. But – of course there’s a but – I’ve been making myself face a lot of truths about the realities of the situation I’m in. Motivational realities. Financial realities. Trying to imagine what I want my business to look like five or ten years down the road. Can I even imagine still running my business five years down the road?

That’s opened the door to imagining all kinds of possible futures. If what I do now isn’t my career, then what do I want my career to be? It’s a big question (there have been a lot of big questions lately). So I thought about it, and then I thought some more. And then some more (and I’m still thinking about it). I started thinking about academia again, about applying to go back to school. My summer in Oslo last year was a little bit of a test-run/research trip, actually, though of course I didn’t divulge that here at the time. I quietly applied to grad schools last fall, and I also started thinking about the possibility of teaching English again (especially after I didn’t get in to a few of the more competitive programs I applied for). But when I found out I got into the University of Tromsø’s master’s program in Theoretical Linguistics, it was a game-changer. It’s a department I’ve followed since I was an undergrad, in a city I’ve been to and like quite a lot, in a country I really love. There are many reasons it’s neither the most practical nor the “safest” option at this juncture. There’s a lot of risk involved in a leap like this. And I agonized for a few weeks as I tried to make my decision about what to do. But in the end, I couldn’t say no – the stuff about this decision that doesn’t make sense falls away in the wake of all of the things that make total sense. Sometimes a big leap makes sense, even if it’s risky in some ways. And I am very lucky to have a partner who’s been supportive of this decision and is probably just as excited to move to Tromsø as I am.

So what does that mean for the future of Paper Tiger? It’s a valid question, and a good one. And the answer, of course, is that at this point it’s impossible to know. I’m not naive about what I’m taking on with a research-based graduate degree. I won’t make any promises about whether or not I’ll continue designing once school starts this fall. But I can say that this space isn’t going anywhere. I’ll definitely still be knitting (I’m literally moving to the Arctic, after all), and I plan to keep writing – about knitting, about Norway, about whatever seems relevant. I’m definitely excited for a chance to learn more about knitting in Norway, and get to know Norwegian yarns that are domestically raised and produced.

In the meantime, I do have a few things lined up for fall release that I’m working on before the move, so you certainly haven’t seen the last of my patterns yet. This is still my day job, at least for a few more months!

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For those who will ask about the mitten in the photo: it’s purely selfish knitting! The university seal of UiT features stylized renderings of Odin’s ravens from Norse mythology, Hugin and Munin (representing “thought” and “memory”), and I couldn’t resist knitting them up in to an otherwise very traditional Norwegian mitten. I actually knit myself a pair of mittens when I got into grad school the first time around, too. I’m happy to say my skills have progressed since then!