Are Comfort and Ease Good for You?

Depends on who you're asking....

Calcata Vecchia, the medieval village where I lived with John when I first came to Italy. It’s an artists’ community of about sixty people. Photo by Stacey Eskelin.

Seven years ago today, I did the hardest thing I have ever done. I left the United States and moved to Italy.

The physical act of moving wasn’t hard. I sold all my furniture, my blue Kio Rio, most of my clothes, and yes, a piece of my soul. All my worldly possessions were condensed into two duffel bags filled with books. I buddy-passed it to Rome on American Airlines. Despite my anguish and turmoil, I was strangely calm. My conflicted emotions were cannibalizing each other—excitement, panic, relief, panic, grief, panic. All my wonderful students at 24-Hour Fitness threw me a fabulous party, but privately, they must have been thinking: has Stacey lost whatever is left of her mind?

It may have seemed as though I had a choice, but looking back, I’m not sure I did. Not only had I fallen hopelessly in love with Italy, I’d fallen in love with an American who lived there, my boyfriend John. Returning to the U.S. after my twice-annual visits left me in a swoon of despair. I couldn’t “land.” Maybe I was afraid to. Maybe I recognized that comfort and ease are the softest chains of all, barely perceptible, and dismissing the hand reaching out to me was to slam the door on my own future.

I could continue struggling to make ends meet as a single mom in Houston, or I could roll the dice on a relationship in a country where I didn’t even speak the language.

One was the devil I knew; the other was the devil I didn’t.

View from La Grotta dei Germogli, a restaurant in Calcata that overlooks the Treja Valley. Photo by Stacey Eskelin.

My eighteen-year-old son, quite understandably, had no interest in going with me. He wanted out of our cramped apartment, and his dad had just purchased a roomy house with a spacious backyard. My daughter was scheduled to join me in Italy a month later. The odds of her liking it there were slim, but it was a chance we had to take, and I vowed not to drown myself in tears if she opted to go back home again, which she eventually did. This was a huge move for me, let alone an adorably social fourteen-year-old girl who, like most of her kind, loved Fall Out Boys, Taco Bell, and the mall.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” and I have tried to live up to that principle. Sometimes you have to let go of the branch and go down the river, even if the rocks dash you to pieces. I preached it to my students. “Take risks,” I’d say. “If you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.”

But to actually put those words into practice … I had no idea how hard it would be. Not only was I leaving my friends and family, who are everything to me, I was trading in a steady paycheck for the soul-shriveling uncertainty of life as a freelance writer.

In hindsight, I was the very definition of a fool. And yet, how could I stay? Every morning in the U.S., I woke up on the wrong side of capitalism. I loved my job, but was working seven days a week with no health insurance and still couldn’t pay my bills. The ugliness of Houston’s freeway/strip mall/suburb aesthetic bore down on me, day in and day out, like a slow gray depression. Every time I turned around, someone had their hand out: $45.00 for Internet. $120 for cell phone service. $200 for car insurance. $1600 for rent.

The years since I left have been, at times, unbearably difficult. Life as a freelancer? I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Poverty breaks your spirit. The money is a rollercoaster ride so nausea-inducing, few people can handle it. How many times have I dug around my own couch cushions, looking for a forgotten euro? Checked the bottom of my purse for the third time, hoping, hoping? Taken writing jobs that I knew would be thankless and awful—and were?

I regret nothing.

“The world is violent and mercurial,” the playwright Tennessee Williams once wrote. “It will have its way with you. We are saved only by love—love for each other, and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

In Houston, as happy as I was, I wasn’t alive, I was hibernating. Left uncorrected, hibernation becomes death. That’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for some, and it’s true for me. Falling in love with Italy and with John shocked me awake, even though awakenings can be intensely painful.

But with time comes perspective, and I can see the hand of destiny in all this. Not Divine Destiny, but the soul’s evolution and fulfillment. I wasn’t meant to be comfortable. I was meant to live. Really live. I was meant to love, even though love is putting a knife in someone else’s hands and hoping they don’t use it on your throat. I was meant to write, even though no one reads anymore, the industry is in chaos, and Bangladeshi garment workers make more money than I do, despite the shiny writing awards and publishing contracts.

As humans, we keep looking for security and comfort. Who can blame us? Life is a zero-sum game we play every second we’re on this rock. But I have come to accept that I may never feel secure or comfortable. Maybe I’m not supposed to. Maybe security and comfort would blunt the edge of the only weapon I have left at this point, which is my words. That, and an awareness of my own insignificance.

We must never look away. And we must never ever forget.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love? Feel free leave your comments below.