What people mean.

You’re so brave!

That takes guts!

You’re fearless!

When I decided to move to Rio Caliente, I was told this by many people. My parents’ friend said I’m her hero. My direct reports at work said they admired me even more when they learned where I was going, the brave thing I was doing.

But it doesn’t seem that brave to me, or that strange. I have moved around a lot in my life, more than most people. By the time I was 12 I had lived in eight states; by the time I graduated from high school I had been to 13 schools. That’s more than one a year. Three in 4th grade alone. I did my Master’s degree in London, so this is not even the first time I have moved to a different country.

But no matter how I demurred, people said “you’re brave.” And then I realized what they were really saying: ”You’re crazy.”

I am doing the unthinkable. To leave a job in Manhattan as Associate Director of Project Management for Publicis Modem. To leave a rent-stabilized apartment in the Meatpacking District. To leave my Republican friends, the ones who live on the north shore of Long Island and have big boats. To leave the condo I own in Connecticut. You’re brave. You’re crazy.

I am not crazy—my mother is crazy, actually, so I know about crazy. The best way to answer people who tell me I’m brave/crazy is to tell them I have a backup plan.

Which I do (I’m not crazy after all). Here is my back up plan: if I want to go home after six or eight or ten months, I will go home. I am not banned from the country, I still have my US Passport (unless McCain wins, in which case I might consider voluntarily relinquishing it). I have a tenant in my condo in Connecticut, but the lease is up in March. I have a friend who runs Project Management at an agency about 10 minutes from my condo. He will give me a job any day of the week that I want to walk in the door. That’s my back up plan. I can go back to the way things were, to my last life.

But I’m not going to. When you change your life, like I have changed mine, you never need a back up plan, because something new happens. When I moved to New York in 2002, I think my back up plan was to take a job as a nanny for an American family in China. Who can remember? Instead I got a job at an agency in Connecticut and bought a condo. That wasn’t my original plan, and it wasn’t my backup plan either. It is what happened in my life.

So I’m not brave, I’m not crazy, I do have a back up plan. But more importantly, I’m going to see what will happen next in my life.