How one small question about Italy launched our lives from comfortable to chaos.

article 1: the beginning

One week ago I woke up, rolled over and spoke these words to my husband “Do you want to move to Italy?”

I don’t know what compelled me to utter those words. Was it a dream? Did something happen the week before to make me want to say that? Nope. There was nothing extraordinary or different about the week before. Nothing that made me think of Italy. No event, no conversation, no trip.

And yet his answer back, without even a moment’s pause was: “Yes.”

That question and answer has plummeted us into a week of chaos. There hasn’t been a single emotion I haven’t felt since then. Fear, uncertainty, anxiety, happiness, excitement, sadness, frustration, doubt, worry, joy, hope.

Nothing plunges you into a complete black hole of an existential crisis like contemplating the unravelling of your entire life. 

The questions we’ve asked each other this week have been some of the most difficult and emotional questions we’ve ever talked about. Financial freedom and stability, retirement, my company, our health, the future of our kids, our relationships with our friends, our aging parents, the importance of the things we own, what truly matters to us, and yes, the darkest question of all, our own death.

So what does one do when suffering from a complete emotional meltdown brought on by no one but yourself? Pop a Xanax and write. 

So here I am, journalling our story in the hopes that when I read this back to myself, everything we’ve decided to do makes sense, and we are able to reach the decision we are trying to reach, the answer this path is taking us down:

Should we move to Italy?

Neither of us speak the language. We’ve vacationed there multiple times over the past 10 years, but have never lived there for more than three weeks at a time. There are so many obstacles. The pros and cons list is a mile long right now. It’s come to our realization that getting older makes it harder to make big life decisions. Even the thought of selling our cars gives us anxiety.

And don’t even get me started on the people in our lives. How will we see and talk to the kids on a regular basis? How will we maintain our friendships here? What if we want to come back, where will we live? What if something happens to our parents? How will I run my company? What if one of us gets sick, or god forbid, dies? Are we going to regret our choice, whichever way we decide?

If the pros weren’t so damn tempting, we wouldn’t even be thinking of this. Giving Brent the freedom to stop working early is huge. To be mortgage free early. To have a home where we could have property, a garden and space, maybe even a pool. To have our own bed and breakfast on our property. To be closer to our desired travel locations. To be financially secure with enough cash in the bank to live a very comfortable retirement.

And finally, and maybe most importantly, to give us purpose, a dream, and something to look forward to doing in this last third of our lives, if we are both lucky enough to get that long on this crazy, beautiful ride.

Every single step and decision of this process brings so much emotion. This is fucking hard. Today was hard. This week was hard. 

But I keep telling myself, this decision doesn’t have to be made today. All we have to do is research one tiny piece of this at a time. And this week I’ll figure out step one. How can we qualify for a visa that would allow us to live in Italy at all?

Breathe my girl, one small step at a time. The answer will get clearer as we go.