an introduction

At the age of 12, my parents bought a house in the suburbs. My elder siblings moved away, and my parents, younger sister, and I moved from the multicultural inner city to a predominantly white area. This was a reality shift that was hard for me to digest.

The first year living in the suburbs was hard. Being in the 7th grade is hard in its own right, puberty, boobies, boys. Add moving to a new place where I didn't know anyone and being around people who didn't look like me. This was baby’s first experience with anxiety and sadness. I was never officially diagnosed, but looking back on this time of my life that is exactly what I was going through. My mom would wake me up every morning for school and without fail, I would have a panic attack. I would cry and plead with her to let me stay home, I wanted to be with people who were familiar. I wasn't ready to do school. I don’t remember how I got over it exactly. I’ve gone through moments of deep sadness since then. The toxic relationship with my first boyfriend, graduating university, and most recently, moving to a new country.

Being Latina, I have never lived more than 30 minutes away from my family. I lived on my own for three years but Coldemort happened; I was tired of paying rent and I didn't know what I was doing with my life, so I moved back in with my parents.

Feeling like I wasn't really advancing in life, and feeling stuck in a job that I hated but wasn't ready to leave, I fell back on something that has always brought me joy: travel. I decided I was going to spend a summer in Europe. I worked from home, and I was just spinning my wheels, so why not.

I fell in love with Portugal the summer of 2022. On the 3rd day of my 3 month stay in Europe, I called my dad and told him I was going to live here. Of course, he was like dlo chill, spend the summer there, feel it out, and once you come back we can talk about it. I wasn't expecting to love a place I didn't know anything about, but I knew deep within me that I needed to live here.

That summer was the most transformative experiences of my life so far. I met such great people, I had so much fun.

The experience of being back home was more than post vacation blues. I changed in the 3 months I was away and I came back to a place I knew I had outgrown. The combination of feeling like I had outgrown a place and missing life in Portugal more than I thought I would. That familiar emotion started to come back again…an old friend slowly started to color every aspect of my life again. I was unsatisfied with the way I was living before going to Europe, but being back, that sadness felt like a snowball turning into an avalanche.

I moved to Lisbon in spring and the time from then to now has been quite the experience. I have vacillated from feeling like the most liberated person, to that 7th grader who just moved to the suburbs. I wasn't ready to share before but the experiences and the memories felt like they were begging to be told.

This blog is a collection of experiences of starting my life over in Europe. It’s been quite the adventure, there has been sunshine and there has been rain, there were bouts of uncontrollable laughter, and what felt like never ending streams of tears. I was laid off, heartbroken, isolated and trying to come back home to myself. I hope in sharing my adventures and musings, you don’t feel so alone in your sadness, desires for change, or feeling like an outsider. This is a blog about finding the courage to live an authentic life.