Hi, I’m Georgie!

White woman with brown curly hair smiling in a red jumpsuit, in front of a tree with white flowers

I love mornings, delicious memoirs, strong coffee, and flowers that are so brightly colored it’s almost embarrassing. And I’m so glad you stopped by.

What’s this about?

Curious Georgie is a blog about living as boldly as possible. About being alive. About the small and big things that save us: real people, real community, and telling the truth about our real lives.

My goal with this blog is to tap into something universal within all of us: our need to seek out our truest truths and our most fulfilling lives.

Here are some topics you’ll find here: family, relationships, work, travel, writing, expat life, humanitarian work, mental health, and, because some posts defy categorization, I don’t even know.

But regardless of the topic, woven through each of my pieces are the questions we’re asking ourselves all the time: How does one live?

What am I doing here? Who even am I? Have I done enough today? What should I do tomorrow?

And what do you do if you sort of got buffeted by big waves and now you can’t get back up off the ground and you have sand all stuck in your swimsuit and seawater up your nose?

These are the critical questions we must ask ourselves.

What kind of stories will you find here?

I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went to college in Boston before catapulting myself overseas to Amman, Jordan to study Arabic. The decision to study Arabic in college and then spend a semester abroad in the Middle East was a consequential one that would take my life in a new direction, though I didn’t know it at the time.

After college I accepted a full-time job offer back in Jordan, and to everyone’s surprise including mine, I ended up living there for the next seven years.

During those years I met expats from all over the world, stumbled into a career in humanitarian aid, fell in love, and got married. For the first half of my time there, I co-managed a youth center for Syrian refugees in Zaatari Refugee Camp. In the later years, I led various research projects on the Syrian refugee crisis. Eventually I became homesick from so many years living overseas, and moved back to the US. I had a beautiful life in Jordan but I hated living 8,000 miles away from my family.

Let’s just say I arrived in Jordan as a 22-year-old who was about as green and naïve as they come, and returned to the US as a 29-year-old who was newly married, adept at warding off nosy Jordanian taxi drivers, homesick, fluent in Arabic, and war-weary from having done a deep dive into the Syrian civil war.

I write about all that stuff (and more!) here. My wedding. Amateur hour at work. Trying to have a poker face when someone says something weird. How I hate flying over the ocean. Caregiving for a sick family member. How to put something like real love down on paper. What home means to me. Swimming in Walden Pond. Feeling more and more like myself as time passes (I’m now 32).

Fun facts and community responses

Since I launched this blog in 2022, I have been blown away by the positive responses and the growing community of readers that has developed around it. Nearly 4,000 people and/or robots have visited!

When I hear from readers that my writing resonates, or that a post gave them an electric feeling of “yes, same,” I’m encouraged to keep going — especially as I work on my first memoir. You can see what readers have to say about this blog on my Testimonials page.

A few more fun facts:

Whether you just found me or you’ve been following along for years, I’m so glad you’re here! THANK YOU for stopping by. Feel free to drop me a note. ❤️

PS. While working with Syrian refugees, I learned that the humanitarian aid world is not known — SURPRISINGLY! — for effectively protecting refugees’ privacy when sharing their stories. There are many examples out there; this data privacy breach by a top UN official is a particularly egregious one.

There exists a highly problematic, extractive culture of aid agencies sharing refugees’ photos, videos and stories (often without meaningful consent) for fundraising purposes. This bugs me. I’m careful about what I post here. If I’m sharing a photo or video of someone, I have that person’s consent to share it. I often change names and identifying details when writing about real people. And if I’m using someone’s real name, I have that person’s consent.

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