Why I Left My American Life Behind and Moved to Italy
Was I nuts? Yeah, probably.
Seven years ago, I quit my job as a personal trainer and group fitness instructor, sold my blue Kia Rio, unloaded my furniture, packed what was left of my earthly belongings into two bags, and flew on a buddy pass to Rome. It sounds so cut-and-dry, I know. Make a plan. Execute the plan.
But it was I who felt as though she’d been executed. I left behind some amazing friends, a job I loved, my then eighteen-year-old son who, quite understandably, had no interest in going with me, plus my daughter who was scheduled to fly over a month later. The odds of her liking Italy were slim, at best, but it was a chance we had to take. I vowed that I would not cry myself to sleep if she opted to go back home again. 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.
A week before leaving, I had what amounted to a mini nervous breakdown with the hyperventilating and the sweating and the late night calls to the friends I felt as though I were abandoning. There were also other, larger, issues at play in my drippy leave-taking. I had to muck around in my own psychological mud puddles, ones of trust and dependency. My love affair wasn’t just with Italy, but a man I met there, a unique and wholly remarkable man. After years of flying solo, I was now rolling the dice in a way that left me questioning whether I could actually go through with this, whether I’d lost my mind, whether I had the guts (or the craziness) to do the hardest, scariest thing in my life in three ways: leave my family, leave my country, and cultivate a relationship against all odds of success.
If my past history with love was anything to hang my hat on, there was no hat to hang. My taste in men was as infamously bad as my politics were left. I didn’t speak Italian; I parroted phrasebook. I was giving up a steady paycheck to write — what a joke! Statistically, I stood a better chance of contracting a hemorrhagic disease than making my living with my pen. And now I would be leaning hard on someone to help me navigate simple life transactions like buying groceries or pumping gas. We would also be doing some navigating of our own as we tried to match up our emotional baggage. That gets harder as you get older. They never tell you that, but it’s true.
To my face, my friends were wonderfully supportive, even admiring. Breaking out of Rikers is easier than breaking out of a comfort zone. They knew that. But behind my back, I imagine they must have expressed some justifiable doubts.
In one form or another, some directly, others less so, the people I knew asked me why I decided to leave.
Here then is my answer.
Every morning in the U.S., I woke up on the wrong side of capitalism. I loved my job, but I was working seven days a week and still couldn’t pay my bills. The utilitarian ugliness of Houston’s freeway/strip mall/suburb bore down on me, day in and day out, like a slow gray depression. Going to the supermarket with its bright shiny aisles and over-processed everything was a stab wound. So were the seventy dollars for two bags of groceries.
Nothing in Italy is bright or shiny. It’s old and ramshackle. I don’t hear sirens all day or see billboards the size of swimming pools. I hear church bells and roosters. Roses grow in wild profusion over crumbling stone walls. Grapes spill over trellises. In summer, Italy puts on all her finery. She seduces you again and again, robbing you of any ambition except to gaze rapturously at her beautiful face.
Returning to the U.S. after vacationing in Italy had, at one time, left me stunned and sad and a little panicky. I couldn’t “land.” Maybe I was afraid to. Maybe I worried, on some level, that I would get trapped there in the delicate filaments of ease, comfort, convenience, like the victim of a thirsty capitalist spider.
Is life easy in Italy? Never. Doing the simplest thing—collecting a package from the post office, for instance—can easily become a three-day debacle of random closings, wildly nonsensical rules about when you are able to collect your package, lost, unrecoverable receipts, VAT fees, and despair.
Since I write in English all day, it has seriously undermined my ability to become fluent in Italian. It’s a damned difficult language to learn, by the way. Italian grammar is a cross between Times Square and the Spanish Inquisition. But hardest by far has been my inability to see my kids in Houston. The pandemic saw to that.
You mustn’t regret the things you do for love. And I can never regret this. Getting out of my comfort zone has shown me who I am. And knowing who I am has become my superpower. I had no idea how indestructible it would make me. I had no idea that love had the power to burn you to the ground and let you rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Tell me what you have done for love. Leave your comments below.
Seven years! That astonishes me, and yet, of course. At the same time, everything about you astonishes me. And yet, of course.
That's some courageous writing there, kid. Well said. As much as I'd love to tell you what I've done for love, I'm not certain I want to commit that to written form just yet. Perhaps if we're fortunate enough to meet at some point. :-)