Giving Up Everything

Let’s talk about the emotional trauma of all this. 

Because it is absolutely terrifying and it ignites so much fear and depression and hopelessness and grief and sorrow and so on. 

(this is going to be a long one BUT it comes with cute animal pictures!)

For me… my entire life has always been about my animals. I build my world around them, dedicated my time, my education, my heart, and attention all to my animals. I mean I freaking founded a non-profit wildlife rescue and cared for 600 wild rescues in a year, almost single handedly, while still working full time, caring for the house, caring for an ill partner and maintaining my own pet animals. To say they were my entire life still even feels like an understatement. And for almost all of my life I was extremely dedicated to the idea that I will never part with my animals. It was a hard limit. Until the burn out really started to sink in. At the worst of it, my animals were at risk due to my extreme depression and inability to keep working for them. Not sure how many people who don’t suffer from depression know this… but it can get bad enough where you can’t even take care of yourself, let alone anything else. There were days I could hardly get out of bed, I had no motivation to do ANYTHING. It’s really difficult to even accurately describe the sheer emptiness that can happen. Also the memory loss… stress induced memory loss is definitely a thing that doesn’t get talked about enough! 

For me… my animals were my rock, they were my emotional support when things got bad. When I couldn’t turn to them anymore… I was entirely lost. There was always just one creature that still acted as an emotional sink for me and I will die on the hill that self care is pressing your face into an extra fluffy cat. Chaos, my best kitty, has been my emotional rock through it all… and I have been absolutely terrified of losing him… especially since the reason I have him was because I lost my first soul kitty in 2019 to an unpredictable medical event. I didn’t think I would find another cat like him and wasn’t looking for a while, but then I saw an adoption post for Chaos (who was then called Lucifer) and something just felt right. I went to meet him and he was just so perfect. If I was a religious or spiritual person I would have said that my past kitty, Merlin, led me to this new kitty to help heal the hole he left in my heart with his passing, the last little bit of magic he gave me. 

Chaos is a non negotiable in this journey. Even if I have to give up everything else, he is the one and only entity that will stay with me no matter what. 

That said, I am intending to take my other two cats, two crested geckos and hopefully some of my snakes. 

But that is a drastic decrease for me. Let me circle back to before I got all emotional over my cats. 

Animals were my rock… and then they weren’t. The burn out got so bad that caring for so many things had become a burden and a stressor. And the part people don’t talk about is just knowing that fact was an additional stressor in itself! Basically… I felt bad for feeling bad. Even before I got serious about moving, I had started to reduce my menagerie just for my own mental health and the health of my animals. 

At my peak I had over 60 animals that were not rescues. I was raising sheep and chickens for food. I had two emus that I absolutely adored and they were something I had dreamed of keeping since i was kid. They were my dino birds, Eon and Era and they were just the best giant fluffy dinosaurs ever! I had 20+ snakes including venomous snakes. Some were for education programs, some I was hobby breeding on occasion. I had a red tegu and two crocodilians that had all come in as rescues and, obviously, were not something to be released. They did education programs. I had my education birds- a kestrel, great horned owl, I had a blue jay at one point, and Katharsis, a turkey vulture who was my first and has been with me for 9 years. She is going to her new home in just a few weeks. My Macaw, Jack, who I had known from a baby when my stepdad first got her and always considered her MY bird even before she came to live with me. I found her a wonderful home with a great bird family and they send me updates about her all the time but, man, if that wasn’t almost as painful as losing Merlin….  Finally, of course I have my cats, and an aging dog (just one now, my other dog passed away a little over a year ago). This was my life. They were all my life, and I loved every single one of them (yes, even the animals I was raising for food)

Coming to the decision to let go… to find homes for them and separate myself from this core part of who I was… how do I even describe it… like ripping off all my skin with a dull rusted potato peeler and then bathing in salt and lemon juice. Visceral enough?

And the process continues. I am still finding homes for some of my snakes, my dog is going to live with my former partner and his family- they also took the sheep and the chickens and raise cattle as well. And I am still deciding if I should just find homes for ALL my snakes or try to take a few with me… My very first snake, Eclipse, is 18 years old and I got him as just a tiny baby. A lot of it will depend on where I end up. I want to go to Norway and their reptile keeping laws are very strict. I could probably bring some of my kings and corns and geckos, but my scrub python wouldn’t be allowed 😦 and he’s just the sweetest and best neck massage giver. It’s still so much to think about. I also have a really gorgeous vivarium with lots of plants and some dart frogs in it, as well as a planted betta sorority tank that are obviously not candidates to travel overseas but it’s so hard to let them go after all the time and effort put into them. My dart tank plants are thriving and growing so much I have to cut them back every other week or so and I get lots of clippings to propagate from them- after a lifetime of being a plant killer this was a huge win for me! I hate to let them go 😦 

If you ever read the series His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) then you will be familiar with the process of cutting away a child’s daemon and the way it tormented and changed them… that is how I feel with every rehoming of my animals. A piece of my soul is torn away.

When I say that this whole process of moving abroad is not easy… this is my specific struggle. I’ll get to the job worries, and foreign country anxieties and all that later… but for me… this is the hardest possible thing to imagine… but I am still doing it. And if I can do this… then the rest will be a breeze.