Hey, I’m Georgie!

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 constantly seek out our truest, most fulfilling lives.

Sure, but what do I actually write about? Here are some topics you’ll find here: family, relationships, work, travel, writing, expat life, humanitarian work, mental health, and my personal favorite: I don’t even know (some posts I simply don’t know how to categorize!).

But regardless of the topic, woven through each of my pieces are the questions we’re all 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.

Is Georgie my real name?

Full disclosure: my real name is George. My parents named me after the English novelist George Eliot. But ever since I was a little kid, everyone’s called me Georgie.

I love my name, though being a woman with a man’s name causes all sorts of headaches at the bank, doctor’s office, airport, you name it. People just get confused. I don’t blame them.

I grew up as a normal-ish kid in Milwaukee, WI, and then went to college in Boston, MA before catapulting myself overseas to Amman, Jordan to study Arabic. With that last move, again, people sometimes get confused. I don’t blame them.

I never quite know how to explain it, except to say that in college, I took an Arabic 1 class on a complete whim. I loved it, and so I took Arabic 2 and then Arabic 3. The decision to take that first Arabic class – a consequential one, though I didn’t know it at the time – took my life in a whole new direction.

What happened there?

After spending one semester studying abroad in Jordan, I returned to finish college in Boston and then accepted a job offer in Jordan upon graduating. Though it was not my original plan, I built off of that first job and ended up living in Jordan for seven years in total, during which time I got married, met expat friends from all over the world, and stumbled into a career in international development.

I spent several years working with Syrian refugees in Jordan. When I first moved there, I co-managed a youth center for Syrian kids and teens in a large refugee camp called Zaatari Camp in northern Jordan.

Later I worked on a few different research projects relating to the Syrian refugee crisis. For one UN-funded research study, I drove all over Jordan interviewing Syrian refugees about whether or not they intended to return to Syria. More recently, I continued working in international development work but pivoted to project management for global projects, expanding beyond my initial focus on the Middle East.

Eventually I became really homesick and tired of living overseas, and moved back to the US with my husband. I’ve always been close to my family, and hated living 8,000 miles away from them. Now I live on the outskirts of Boston. My family is spread between Wisconsin and New York, but at least I’m a train ride or short flight away from them now, rather than a 24-hour journey away like I used to be. We could be at each other’s front doors in, like, five hours from now, if needed.

To put things another way, 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 in love, adept at living as an expat and warding off nosy Jordanian taxi drivers, homesick, newly married, fluent in Arabic, and a bit war-weary from having done a deep dive into the Syrian civil war.

Soo what are we doing here?

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 true love down on paper. What home means to me. Swimming in Walden Pond. Feeling more and more like myself as I grow up (I’m now 32).

Since I launched this blog in 2022, I have been blown away by the positive responses and the small-but-growing community of readers that has developed around it. Over 3,000 people (and/or robots!) have visited.

And when I hear from readers that my writing resonates, that a post gave them an electric feeling of “yes, same”, I’m encouraged to keep going. Especially as I’m working on my debut memoir — a daunting task. You can see what readers have to say about this blog here.

Whether you just found me or have been following along for years: I’m so glad you’re here!

A few more fun facts:

• My most popular post: My Husband’s Surprise Gift
• I send new posts first to my email list, where I also sometimes share exclusive posts I don’t want to share with the whole wide world. Sign up here.
• I also post my work on Medium, where it can find a wider audience based on tags and publications that focus on the themes I write about. Two of my pieces were featured in Medium’s Boost program, which was exciting! You can see them here and here.

I think that basically sums up what we’re doing here. THANK YOU for stopping by! If you want to chat, drop me a note. ❤  

xoxo,
Georgie

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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. In the refugee camp where I worked there was a highly problematic, extractive culture of aid agencies sharing refugees’ photos, videos and stories (often without meaningful consent) for fundraising purposes. This bugged 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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