Moving home & New Beginnings

About moving home & New beginnings.

While I’m writing this, I’m on a plane somewhere above the Atlantic ocean. I’m typing this with pain in my heart and with tears in my eyes: we’re leaving the US. We’re moving back home.

From the day that we left a year ago, I knew this day would come. I just never thought that it would look like this….

Reset

Let me back up a little bit. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I moved to the USA in May last year. My husband was offered to do an assignment there for a year and we decided to take that opportunity.

We got married, I quit my job, we packed our suitcases and off we went.

Moving abroad gave us the chance to hit the reset button on our lives and start over again. It allowed us to discover what we truly find important in life.

How do we want to live our lives? How do we want to spend our time? What matters and what doesn’t?

Important questions that I never really gave any thought before. And honestly, I don’t think I would have wanted to ask myself these questions, afraid of the answers.

Lost & Found

Before we left, I wasn’t in a good place. My energy was drained from years of pushing through, putting other people’s needs before my own, and not listening to myself. I just kept going and I was almost at the point that it was getting the best of me.

I needed a change and I’m so grateful that this opportunity came along. In a way, I think it kind of saved me.

When I quit my job, I really couldn’t imagine not working and I thought I’d go crazy after two weeks without a job. I even told Stan I didn’t want to move, if I wasn’t allowed to work.

But once we arrived in the US, getting a work permit turned out to take much longer than expected and it didn’t make any sense to apply, if I could only work a few months after I’d get it.

So, there I was: on the other side of the world with no job. And I was thinking to myself: What am I going to do now?

Better days

To answer that question I had to dive deep and figure out what really sparks joy in me. I started trying new things. I learned to embrace silence and calmness. And instead of pleasing everyone around me and doing what I thought everyone expected me to do, I finally started listening to my inner voice.

There were definitely some challenges and struggles along the way. I had to overcome quite some fears and blocks that were holding me back, such as my perfectionism, insecurities and fear of failure.

But gradually, piece by piece, I’ve build up my foundation again and it’s stronger than it’s been in a while.

Leaving early

We were supposed to move back end of April, and you may be wondering why we decided to move back early.

Currently we’re in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Around the world schools have closed, people are working from home and countries are closing their borders.

There’s a lot of uncertainty and no one really know what’s going to happen or how long this situation is going to last.

At the moment, the situation in Europe is much worse than in the US, so at first we weren’t too worried. But as things were getting worse, we started thinking about our options.

Airlines are cancelling more and more flights and people are getting stuck abroad as countries are closing their borders.

The lease of our apartment ends the end of April, as well as our health insurance, and we did not want to run the risk of being stuck here or getting sick when the situation gets worse.

Changes and New Beginnings

So on Wednesday evening, we decided that it would be best to move back home as soon as possible. We booked a plane ticket for Saturday, which gave us 2 days to empty and clean our house, and pack our suitcases.

Let me tell you: those 2 days were intense! We barely slept and in between the packing, cleaning and selling stuff, I think I had about 10 mental breakdowns.

A change like this does something with you. I know that my physical environment (house, country, people) is changing completely in just a few days. But it’s not just that. We’re also saying goodbye to our lives here.

Leaving something behind is never easy. But saying goodbye to the place you’ve lived and made so many memories together in just 2 days, when you aren’t prepared for it, is tough. That combined with a lack of sleep, had my emotions go all over the place.

But the fact that it brings up so much in me, also tells me that we’ve truly had the most amazing time. And I’m so incredibly grateful that we’ve had the chance to experience all of this.

We laughed, we cried, we traveled, we learned, we grew, and we enjoyed every moment to the fullest. It was truly an adventure of a lifetime, and that is something to be remembered.

And while this is the end of an incredible chapter. I know that is also the beginning of a brand new one.