Leaving America Is The Biggest, Yet Easiest Decision Of My Life

I’ll never be a cultural resident of Spain, and I don’t care

**Source: Author / You tend toward jamón, but it’s not in your DNA**

Several Medium authors write and write well about moving to a different country. Charlie Brown and Livia Dabs RN,MSc come to mind immediately. In fact, when I think about the move my partner and I hope, plan and intend to make the words they write about their experiences help reconfirm that we’re making the right choice.

Hope, plan and intend — that’s my superstitiousness creeping into the equation. As in, I have to qualify what I expect to happen with hope, plan and intend to fend off jinxing the situation.

Absolutely, an anxiety response.

Maybe you can relate?

That said — some anxiety and fear of the unknown belongs in the equation. It’s crazy to read about how visa and related processes work. Particularly the visa I pay most attention to — Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa — and the ins and outs of setting up life in Spain. And it’s not just a Spanish thing. Talk to people who immigrate to the United States about obtaining visas and green cards.

Even as a detail-oriented planner, the list of requirements, ensuring you meet them and watching rules and guidelines change — seemingly on a dime — can feel daunting.

You’re undertaking a process full of uncertainty. However, it’s not some other important, but more commonplace endeavor, like getting a new job or buying a car. You’re picking up your rightsized life and moving it to a foreign land.

That’s a big deal. At the same time as not being that big of a deal at all.

My superstition doesn’t come into play when I say —

I have zero doubt that I will love living in Spain and look back on my choice to leave the United States as one of the easiest and best decisions of my life.

How can a guy who looks for lucky pennies on the ground and won’t walk under ladders be so certain as he stares into murkiness, if not the objectively unknown?

Because, my partner and I made this decision from a place of —

Being generally happy and content.
Knowing full well who we are.
Having established ourselves professionally.
Wanting to enhance our lifestyle, not fix it.

Moving to Europe — or Canada, Mexico, Asia, wherever — has become a meme.

A social media money shot.

A fad.

Just wait until it looks like Trump will be reelected. It’ll hit a fever pitch again.

For every Charlie, Livia and, eventually, me and my partner, who say they’re going to move, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people who threaten to leave, but never will. These people probably shouldn’t give up the relative comfort and familiarity of their homeland in the first place.

Because, if you’re not doing it for well-considered and grounded reasons, the decision to flee to Europe (or wherever) should prompt anxiety bigger than procedural concerns over visa income requirements or if landlords like renting to expats. You have bigger fish to fry in the cast iron pan of life.

For the record, Livia moved from the U.S. to Europe. Charlie didn’t. Her journey began in Great Britain, where she sold everything to be a digital nomad and then settle — at the moment — with her husband, Sam Dixon Brown, in Portugal.

But, do we even consider Brits European anymore (?)—

Honestly, even the most hardened British Europhiles struggle to identify as European. That landmass just 22 miles south of my home country feels so far removed from the identity of being British it could be thousands of miles away.

It’s a problem. Because when you get a whole country that feels isolated from the very continent it belongs to, you get divisions. You get isolationism.

You get Brexit.

You also get a whole group of people — like me — who have been forced to struggle with their identity every single day.

Am I British? Am I European? Right now, I don’t feel either.

Those are Charlie’s observations. Which got me thinking about all of this.

I don’t really feel American.

I’m of Italian descent, but I’m mostly three generations removed from any of my ancestors having been born in Italy. It makes me laugh when US-born “Italians” — especially Northeast Italians — act as if they live the way Italians in Italy live. That’s akin to beer league softball players calling themselves athletes.

So, I’m sure as hell not Italian.

And, no matter how good a job I do learning the language, respecting and integrating myself with the culture, I’m never going to be Spanish. Or European for that matter.

But I’m perfectly fine with all of this.

I’m less for nationalism or adopting a hometown or culture and more for finding your place, your people and your ideal quality of life at a price you can afford. This is lifestyle, not culture.

Which brings me back to what fuels a person’s decision to move abroad.

Too many people think a wholesale upheaval of their world will fix all of their problems. If you don’t check the above-listed bullet points, chances are making such a drastic move will backfire or have no effect.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I don’t fear moving to Spain and discovering it’s not what I was expecting it to be. Doesn’t mean there won’t be things I don’t like or need to get used to. It just means I know full well what to expect, which is a big reason why I want to move.

I know that my everyday life will be anti-American.

I won’t drive. I’ll walk everywhere and spend a bulk of my time in endless amounts of public space facilitated by dense, mixed-used urban planning. Right there — that description — it’s about as unAmerican as you can get.

If that’s what you like — and you can’t afford to live in the exact perfect part of, say, Manhattan, San Francisco or Boston — you’re screwed. And, let’s face it, for as great as our traditional cities are in America, they’re 99-Cent Store versions of European urbanism.

Ultimately, I’m moving for a culture I have an affinity for and identify with. But, culturally, I’ll never be Spanish. No matter how much or how well you assimilate, I just don’t think that’s possible.

On the other hand, the day-to-day lifestyle and maybe sociopolitical sentiments — which are elements of a culture — these are the things that, while they don’t make you Spanish (or whatever), can put you in the place where you feel you ought to be at a particular point in life. Maybe even for the duration.

You can live the lifestyle. You can’t necessarily fully be a cultural resident.

That’s my attitude going in.

I do my best to live the lifestyle I want and prefer in America. A decidedly urban one. But, if you want to be urban — in the day to day, in the European sense — you simply can’t do it in America. You’ll always be half assing and piecemealing it.

This aversion to the prevailing American lifestyle (and we didn’t even talk about politics, work, materialism, hustle culture, etc.) is enough to make me not feel American. But that doesn’t lead me to cling onto and celebrate some loose and shallow association with my Italian ancestry.

Nor does it make me say I’m moving to Spain because I feel more Spanish than American.

It’s all super complicated stuff until you break it down to the components that matter most. The shared experiences and preferences we can all relate to.

Your daily surroundings. How you navigate them. The way you can, can’t and want to spend your time in them.

This is what a big move — even within a country — comes down to.

You know lifestyle. You can live it.

That’s what you move for. To optimize your quality of life.

You appreciate culture. But, when you’re a foreigner — even somewhat of a foreigner in your own land — you’ll never be able to live it the way you can live lifestyle.

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