April 2021.
The boxes finally arrived at my new home in Monterusciello, a suburb outside of Naples.
I chose the suburbs for a reason. I’m not a city person. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I need quiet. Living in the city of Naples was never an option for me, or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
I had rented this huge house with a shared pool with my neighbor. In my mind, I was going to have pool parties, entertain friends, celebrate life, and just enjoy the fact that I was finally living in Italy. I had plans. Then, as I was unpacking my boxes, something happened. It hit me.
Shit. What did I do?
I had moved to a foreign country.
I wasn’t visiting Italy anymore. I wasn’t on vacation. I lived here. I worked here. This was my home now, and I had to figure out how to actually live in a foreign country.
Reality had officially set in.
Until that moment, I had blinders on. I had a goal in my mind, and everything had been about achieving that goal:
Move to Italy.
I did it. And then, boom. Oh my God. This is real.
It wasn’t funny at the time, but it’s hilarious to me now. I’ve told friends who moved abroad after me, “Just wait. It’s going to hit you.” And eventually, it does
When Everything Becomes a Learning Experience
As I unpacked and started settling into my new job and my new life, things started happening around the house. Things broke. Things needed repairs.
Of course, that happens in any home. But when you live in a foreign country and there’s a language barrier, something as simple as contacting your landlord about a repair suddenly becomes more complicated.
I would have to send messages through WhatsApp, use Google Translate, go back and forth, and hope we understood each other.
Things also moved at a different pace.
As Americans, we are accustomed to things happening quickly. Something breaks, you call someone, and you expect it to be handled immediately, or at least pretty damn close to immediately.
Italy taught me something different. Things get done. But things take time.
That was an adjustment.
I was living alone, dealing with a language barrier, learning a new job, learning a new country, and trying to figure out things that I normally wouldn’t even have to think about.
Even going to the supermarket became an experience. Everything was in Italian. I was reading labels, taking pictures with my phone, translating ingredients and trying to figure out what I was buying.
A trip to the supermarket that might have taken me 20 minutes in the United States could easily take an hour.
And then I started learning that I couldn’t necessarily buy everything in one place. I might have to go to one store for this, another store for that, and somewhere completely different for something else.
There were no familiar routines yet. Nothing was automatic.
Becoming a Child Again
Those first six months were interesting because, in many ways, I felt like a child again.
You are relearning everything.
How to shop. How to communicate. How things work. Where to go. Who to ask. What to do when something goes wrong.
And you are incredibly vulnerable because you know absolutely nothing.
You have to ask for help.
For someone who has always been hyper-independent, asking for help was not easy for me.
But I had no choice.
Living abroad forced me to become comfortable saying, I don’t know. Can you help me?
And over time, I learned something important from that experience:
Vulnerability is not weakness.
Sometimes asking for help is exactly what you need to do. When you are new to a foreign country, you cannot possibly know everything. You don’t know what you don’t know. And I definitely didn’t know what I didn’t know.
This House Wasn’t My Home
As the months passed, I realized something else.
I wasn’t comfortable in that house.
And if you know me, you know I am a homebody. My home is my sanctuary. I need to feel peaceful and comfortable there. If I don’t feel comfortable at home, I’m not going to feel settled anywhere else.
Thankfully, because I had moved to Italy under U.S. government sponsorship, our leases included a six-month escape clause. If the home wasn’t working for us, we had the option to leave after six months. Looking back, that clause made perfect sense.
When you first move to another country, everything is new and exciting. You’re making decisions without really understanding what your everyday life is going to look like yet.
Again, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I exercised that six-month option.
Seriously. I exercised it. I was ready to go.
Okay, What Do I Really Want?
Once I decided to leave that house, I had to ask myself a different question.
What do I actually want?
People had been telling me that I was too isolated in the suburbs.
“You need to live in the city.” I kept saying, “I don’t want to live in the city.”
They explained that if I had guests, they could walk to restaurants and explore on their own. I wouldn’t have to drive everywhere. There would be more things to do. Life would simply be more convenient. Okay. I could see their point.
But I still needed quiet. So I made a deal with myself. If I moved into Naples, I needed to be on a quiet corner.
And once I made that decision, I got very specific.
I started a Pinterest board. I put everything I wanted in that apartment on it.
Clean.
Modern.
Bright.
And did I mention modern? Modern. Modern. Modern. Modern.
I knew exactly how I wanted my next home to feel.
The interesting thing is that I wasn’t worried about whether I would find it.
I knew I would.
And then my dream apartment showed up very, very quickly.
The way it happened still amazes me because it was one of those moments of divine timing where everything seemed to line up exactly as it was supposed to.
Two of my coworkers, completely separately, told me about the same apartment.
And that apartment would become the next chapter of my life in Italy.
Next up: Moving again after just six months, getting settled in Naples.