There is no facebook group for this.

My finger had been hovering over the buy button all week.

Shaking.

Uncertain.

Yet perfectly manicured because the nail salon across the street from my apartment building had all of the good colors.

 
Listen, I knew I was going to purchase the ticket.

I knew I was going to get on this particular flight.

And I knew I was going to start a new life in Southeast Asia with Thailand being my first home for the first 60 days. Maybe, but probably not, longer.

I’d done the research.

I was properly visa-ed and immunized and knew everything I was going to know about this move.

Except for all of the things I couldn’t know until I actually went.

Things like:

Will I make friends?

Will I feel lonely?

Will I find work that I like doing? Or will I spend six months wondering what the hell I’ve done?

Will I miss New York in ways I can’t anticipate?

Will I find a place that feels like home?

Which are the only questions I really wanted answers to.
And also, the only answers you can’t find on the internet.

 
I’m not at all into the whole YOLO! thing. But it does seem to be true that you can only live one life at a time.

Which means that choosing one life means accepting that you’re not choosing any of the other lives you could have lived.
 
When I moved to New York from Ohio, I was done with my Ohio life. This time? I wasn’t sure I was done with New York.

I had finally moved into the neighborhood I’d been wanting to live in from the minute I landed on the island. I had friends to go to the movies with and play flag football with and have brunch at The Paris with on sunny Saturdays. I had a job that paid the bills and allowed me to travel and did not require me to be in the office late at night working on motions for summary judgment.

I knew the City. And it knew me.

 
Which is why my finger was hesitating to click the buy button.

Because buying that ticket meant that I was choosing a different life.

And it very much felt like I was on the verge of choosing a life I didn’t know if I would love. Over a life I already knew I did.

It’d be easy to assume I was hesitating because I was uncertain about whether I want a new life. But I’m not sure it was about the new life at all.

Hesitating is a completely rational response to being asked to give up something real for something that cannot yet prove its value to you.


And this is the sticky thing about moving abroad.

You can’t compare a life you cannot possibly know yet with a life you know intimately because you’re already living it.

 
You know exactly what you stand to lose. Your house. Your belongings. The ordinary Tuesdays and the extraordinary birthday parties and the emergencies that have you scrambling to get there before it’s too late.

But you cannot yet know what, if anything, you’ll gain.

No matter how much research you do.


You can research whether Portugal has good healthcare.

You cannot prove you’ll be happy there.

You can research the cost of living.

You cannot know that you won’t regret leaving or that whatever you find on the other side will be worth what it cost you to get there.

You can research where people are friendly.

You cannot prove you’ll find your people there.

And there is no Facebook group for that.


Research can help you make a smart decision, but it cannot make the decision safe.

Because research and proof are not the same thing.
 
My brain may have decided I was going to leave, but my finger would have very much liked a bit of proof that my life abroad would be worth everything I was going to have to give up to have it.

Unfortunately, that evidence didn’t exist yet.

And I didn’t know whether the possibility of a life I couldn’t see yet was worth giving up all of the things I could see very clearly.

I didn’t know exactly what was on the other side of the ticket.

I didn’t know what I would find.

Or who I would become.

I only knew that I wanted to find out.

 
A decade later, I know what happened.

There were places I made friends.

There were times when I was lonely.

I met people who would teach me about lawn bowls. And feed me homemade spanikopita. And volunteer their mother-in-law to make alterations to a gown I was planning to wear to a swanky event in one of the capital cities of Europe.

I found places I loved.

And places I couldn’t wait to leave.

I had glasses of wine at a beach cafe with yellow umbrellas and bottles of beer at a beach bar with a pool table on two different sides of the world.

I cut a Scottish rug under the castle in Edinburgh on New Year’s Eve and sailed a boat through the Gulf of Thailand.

I lived in cities I never expected to love.

I fell in love with people I couldn’t possibly have known I was going to meet.

I missed New York.

I still miss New York.

I worried about things that turned out to be easy.

And I struggled with things that I didn’t expect to be so hard.

 
But I didn’t know any of that before I got on the plane.

I only knew what I was giving up with absolutely no proof that what I was getting would be better.

And I went anyway.

 
You don’t get to know if the life you’re choosing will be better than the one you’re leaving.

You only get to decide whether you want to find out.

 
Your friend who chose the window seat,
Vivian