But over the past few months, I’ve sat down with 15 different people who actually did it. These weren’t vacationers; they were “Roamers”—people from the US, Russia, the UK, the Philippines, and beyond, who broke down their old lives and tried to piece them back together on completely foreign soil.

They were corporate professionals fleeing burnout, military veterans navigating trauma, young graduates broken by local housing markets, and people running for their lives from sudden geopolitical collapses.

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After listening to hours of raw, unfiltered stories about their triumphs, bureaucratic nightmares, and late-night panics, I realized that everything we are taught about moving abroad is slightly wrong. If you are standing at the edge of a major geographic leap, here is what interviewing 15 real people will teach you about what actually happens when you cross the border.

1. Nobody moves “for adventure” (Even if they think they do)

The biggest myth of the expat lifestyle is that it’s driven by wanderlust. When you dig into the true catalyst for a move, it is almost always structural. People don’t leave comfort; they flee unsustainability. The American Roamers I interviewed didn’t pack up because they hated their country; they left because the “American Dream” was actively breaking them. They cited crushing healthcare systems, astronomical childcare, a toxic hustle culture, and an overwhelming sense of economic displacement.

Roamer 1, a former NYC luxury realtor, recounted negotiating a high-stakes deal from a hospital bed while her premature baby was in the ICU. It was this exact moment of systemic burnout and subsequent medical bills that forced her to flee to Costa Rica.

Similarly, British Roamers described an acute generational exhaustion. Roamer 15, a young UK graduate, found himself stuck in his childhood bedroom because he couldn’t afford rent in England despite finishing top of his class and securing a prestigious management track. He realized the traditional playbook handed down by the previous generation was broken, prompting his move to Australia’s Gold Coast.

Whether it was a 2008 economic collapse stalling a career in Spain—Roamer 13, or the sudden outbreak of war destroying a translation business in Russia—Roamer 6, people move because their home country failed them.

2. The invisible “Scaffold Drop” and the mental health tax.

There is a highly predictable psychological arc that every single Roamer experienced, and it usually hits around day 30 or 60.

When you first arrive, you are bothered with logistics and trying to soak everything in. But eventually, the institutional hand-holding ends, and what I call the “scaffold drop” occurs. The realization sets in that you don’t just live in a postcard; you have to navigate real, mundane life with a fraction of your usual cognitive tools.

Roamer 2 recalled waking up alone on her first morning in France to a heavy “hangover” of disorientation, feeling like a helpless five-year-old child while trying to figure out a local tram ticket machine.

Roamer 3, moving from Kazakhstan, went into a deep depression during her first year in Poitiers, France, when the supportive bubble of her initial restaurant internship vanished and she had to face real student life.

Roamer 9, a former social worker from Texas who moved to Madrid, explicitly noted that days 31–60 are characterized by an overwhelming wave of isolation and panic as the reality of starting over sets in. You don’t just move your body to a new country; you drag your history, your traumas, and your habits with you. If you move to escape yourself, the new country will rudely introduce you to exactly who you are the moment the honeymoon phase fades.

3. The power dynamics of passports and the predatory “Fixer Economy.”

We like to think of the world as a global village, but the interviews painted a starkly unequal picture of international mobility, divided cleanly by the lottery of your birth passport.

If you possess an EU passport like Roamer 5 (moving from France to Spain) or a US passport like Roamer 8 (moving to Mexico City), moving often feels like an administrative annoyance or simply “moving towns”. You can execute border runs, exploit tourist extensions, or rely on economic arbitrage to live comfortably off seasonal work.

But for Roamers from the Philippines, Kazakhstan, or Russia, the process is a frustrating gauntlet of hostile interrogation rooms, frozen bank accounts, and arbitrary rejections. This artificial scarcity has given rise to a deeply entrenched, legally grey “Fixer Economy.”

Roamer 7, a teacher from the Philippines moving to Spain, detailed the heavy emotional toll of visa anxiety. She explained how scarcity forces migrants to pay expensive “fixers” up to ten times the official cost ($300 instead of $4) just to secure a mandatory appointment slot that the government website claims doesn’t exist.

Roamer 12 reinforced this reality in Spain, noting that the bureaucracy is so intentionally old-school and paper-heavy because simplifying it into a clean website would decimate the entire economy of “gestores” (local fixers). It’s a tax on the vulnerable, proving that global freedom of movement is still a luxury item.

4. The trap of financial arbitrage vs. cultural belonging.

Many people move to look for high-paying markets or ultra-cheap digital nomad hubs. But the interviews revealed a fascinating tension between financial success and genuine human happiness. Roamer 13 spent 15 years in Bergen, Norway, specifically because it was a place to make “fast and easy money” at three times the rate of her native Spain. Yet, after a decade and a half of flawless economic stability, she realized she only had one native Norwegian friend. She was financially wealthy but culturally starved, missing the warmth of a community where neighbors spontaneously spilled out into the streets at midnight. She ultimately chose to return to Spain, trading a higher salary for a sense of mutual neighborliness.

On the flip side, this economic disparity is causing severe friction. Roamer 8 in Mexico City highlighted encountering a rising wave of Gen-Z anti-American protests, vandalism, and gentrification backlash.

Roamer 12 in Valencia noted that wealthy foreigners arrive with “sacks of cash” from selling Western properties, driving up housing prices, and pricing out locals who are forced to live with their parents into their 40s.

If you move somewhere purely to extract value because your currency is strong, you will likely find yourself living in a wealthy, insulated, and deeply resented bubble.

5. The ultimate philosophy: “Pensati Fet” (Thought and Did)

If there was one golden thread connecting the individuals who didn’t just survive their move, but genuinely thrived, it was a radical capacity to pivot and an embrace of mortality.

The most profound realization came from Roamer 12. He nearly died of organ failure at a London hospital, waking from a coma only to find that his younger brother had suffered a parallel, fatal heart crisis. That trauma permanently shattered his tolerance for corporate commutes and rush-hour traffic. He moved to Valencia under the local philosophy of “pensati fet”—”thought and did.” When his new Spanish kidney faced rejection later on, he survived it because he had built an intimate, deeply integrated relationship with his local, non-English-speaking medical team.

We saw a similar situation with Roamer 11, a Trinidadian native who left the US for Mexico. He built a successful mobile wellness business by ditching standard social media algorithms, conducting his temporary residency interview entirely in Spanish without taking a single class, and simply letting his intuition guide his steps.

Furthermore, Roamer 14, a US Army veteran medically retired after an injury in Afghanistan, moved his family to rural Nicaragua based entirely on a random internet sidebar banner ad. He navigated political unrest, farm logistics, and chaotic visa laws by simply accepting the environment as it was, rather than trying to force American expectations onto it.

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When you strip away the romanticized travel writing, moving to another country is essentially an act of controlled ego-death. As Roamer 4 who sold his construction business and truck in Denver to move to Mexico with just a backpack—beautifully put it: “It’s kind of like the suicide of my American life. You’re killing a chapter.”

You have to mourn your old identity. You have to accept the humility of not understanding the local dialect, standing in government offices feeling small and missing milestones or funerals across impossible time zones.

But for those willing to go through that, the reward isn’t a permanent vacation. The reward is a profound, unshakeable self-reliance. It’s the realization that home isn’t a specific set of coordinates you inherit at birth. It’s an internal alignment you build piece by piece, country by country, through shared meals, local hobbies, and the courage to jump into the deep end of the ocean and trust your arms to swim.

They found jobs there sometimes, tips about which neighborhood to avoid, which lawyer not to hire, which grocery store they were looking for—useful, practical, transactional information. But community? Belonging? The feeling that you are not completely alone in a brand new country? Almost never through the group.

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Roamer 1 moved from New York to Costa Rica after years of survival mode, a premature baby, $500 ER visits nine times in one winter and $3,600 a month for daycare and a hospital bed. When she got to Costa Rica, she did what everyone does. She joined the expat Facebook groups, but ended up describing them as toxic.

She posted once about finding Meyer lemons at the grocery store and got shredded. “That’s too expensive. Why are you shopping there? That packaging isn’t recyclable.”

She was just trying to help people make a damn pie.

So she left the groups and her actual community came from farmers markets, other parents, recurring faces, small interactions and people who became friends just by existing in the same space repeatedly. Her daughter was, as she put it, her cheat code — a small kid automatically creates connections with other parents that no expat groups can replicate. But beyond that, the expats she actually bonded with were people who were in the same boat like her—looking for connection. Which meant when you were in, you were really in.

When you move abroad, you expect it to be lonely. Everyone drums it into your ears. But what we don’t talk about is that the specific way the infrastructure built to solve that loneliness often makes it worse.

The Facebook group model promises community, but falls short, because everyone is looking for the same thing. And groups built around questions and complaints rather than actual shared experience doesn’t create the conditions for real connection. It creates the conditions for information exchange with occasional hostility.

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Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway and had one Norwegian friend. She had other people she cared about, but they were almost other South Europeans and South Americans. Other people who had also moved for economic reasons and found each other because they were all equally outside Norwegian social life. The Facebook group version of that is everyone in the expat group being equally outside, but never quite getting to know each other.

Roamer 15 admitted he hadn’t put himself out there as much as he should have in Australia. He was working, building social media content and maybe had two free hours a day. He couldn’t join a football club because his rota kept changing. The friends he had were from work and from his housemates. He said: “I wouldn’t say it’s been a fairy tale. I thought I’d move over, form a big friendship group and get a hot surfer girlfriend or anything like that.”

It’s funny but it’s also just true. The version of moving abroad that lives in our heads — the instant community, the group of expats who become your found family within the first month — almost never materializes. And when it doesn’t, people assume they did something wrong. They weren’t social enough, open enough, brave enough. They take the loneliness personally. But it’s not personal. It’s structural.

Think about how you actually made your closest friends. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t through a group you joined explicitly to make friends. It was through forced proximity over time. School, because you were in the same classroom for years. Work, because you spent maybe forty hours a week together. A sports team, a dance class, a neighborhood, a building.

Moving abroad breaks that structure. You arrive with no existing proximity, no shared history, no recurring spaces yet. So, you join a Facebook group full of other people who also have none of those things, and you expect connection to happen.

It doesn’t work like that.

Roamer 14 lived off the beaten path in Nicaragua. He had almost no gringo friends nearby and he watched, from a distance, what happened to the ones who moved to Mexico and clustered in the expat zones.

They came full of excitement. They joined the groups. They went to the expat bars. They found each other immediately — other Americans, other Canadians, other people who spoke their language and got their references and didn’t require the work of cultural translation. Eventually, alot of them went home because what they’d found wasn’t community. It was a bubble. A comfortable simulation of the life they’d left, transplanted to a sunnier location and when the novelty wore off, the bubble didn’t have enough substance to hold them.

The people who stayed — in his observation — were the ones who found their way into something local. A job that required real integration. A relationship with someone from the country. A neighborhood where they were the only foreigner and had to figure it out. You can’t become part of a place from inside a Facebook group.

Roamer 16 fell in love with Málaga the moment she arrived. The warmth of the people, the way a stranger at a bakery calls you cariña before she knows your name. She described it as a special vibe she could hardly explain. She’s right that it’s hard to explain, because what she was describing isn’t a feature of Málaga that you can look up in an expat group. It’s something you absorb through presence. Through going to the same bakery enough times that the woman knows your face. Through existing in a place rather than observing it.

Roamer 17 spent years in a Spanish coastal town before driving 30 kilometres to a new one where she didn’t know anyone. She wasn’t prepared, neither did she do any Facebook group research. She just moved and started all over again, finally finding what she was looking for, by showing up and being present in a new place until it became familiar enough to feel like hers.

I hope you can see the pattern now. Real belonging comes from small, repeated, unplanned interactions

I think about this a lot in the context of what it would actually take to make moving abroad easier and it’s not just the visa part, the housing search and the documents — but the loneliness part. The part where you get to somewhere new and have to rebuild a social world from nothing, usually while also dealing with bureaucracy, language barriers and the load of figuring out how everything works.

The honest answer is that the loneliness is probably irreducible to some degree. You can’t shortcut the time it takes to become a recurring face somewhere and to actually belong.

What you can do is stop expecting the Facebook group to do something it was never designed to do. Stop treating the expat community as a destination and start treating it as, at best, a first week resource. Find the farmers market. Take the class. Walk to the same coffee shop until the person behind the counter knows your order.

Do the boring, slow, unsexy work of just showing up somewhere until somewhere starts to feel like home.

The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad, what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.

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What this does is take your well thought out decision and make it into a problem. It says that you’re not thinking clearly, you’re running away, this is a phase, you’ll come back when you’ve got it out of your system. It never asks whether the problem was in the life you left behind.

One of the things I’ve noticed talking to people who moved abroad in their 20s and 30s is that, contrary to popular opinions, they are not confused. If anything, they’re crystal clear about what they want. They looked at what they were building — the career, the apartment they couldn’t quite afford, the social life that looked full but felt thin and they did something most people never do—they asked whether it actually fit. Not whether it looked right. Not whether it made sense on paper, but whether it fit.

Roamer 15 had a graduate scheme at a five-star hotel. He got good grades, graduated at the top of his class and landed a graduate scheme at a five-star hotel, rotating through every department for two years on a management track.

But he was also 24 and living in his childhood bedroom because buying anywhere in England alone requires two salaries now, and most of his university friends had scattered. He looked at all of that and he left for Australia with £4,000 and a suit he steamed in a hostel shower.

We talk about leaving like it’s purely emotional. Like it’s wanderlust, immaturity or an inability to commit to something real. We don’t talk about it as a rational response to a depleting economy.

Housing costs ten times what it did a generation ago in most major cities. Job security in most industries is imaginative. The career ladder that our parents described — start at the bottom, work your way up, stay loyal, get rewarded—exists in maybe three professions now and everyone is trying to get into the same ones.

Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway making real money. She made three times what she would have made in Spain. She was financially stable by every measure.

But at 40 she asked herself what she actually valued and the answer wasn’t money. She came home to Spain. I think the “crisis” in this situation would be that she finally came to her senses. I’d say she finally became honest with herself.

When someone you know leaves and builds a different life somewhere else, their decision is implicitly a comment on yours because they looked at the same general set of options you were both facing and made a different choice. And if their choice came from clarity rather than confusion, then the natural next question is: what is your staying coming from?

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Calling it a crisis is the defense mechanism. If they’re unstable, you don’t have to ask yourself whether you’re avoiding something. If they’re running away, you don’t have to look at what you are internally avoiding.

I’m not saying everyone should leave. Some people stay because they’ve looked at their life and it fits. Some people leave and find out they were running from something that followed them. The point is society thinks when young people leave, it means instability and when they stay, it means maturity. They couldn’t be more wrong.

I think about what it would take to make this easier. Like the part about the Visas, housing, paperwork, bureaucracy and more importantly—structure. I think about when someone in their 20s or 30s looks at their life, realizes it doesn’t fit and needs help with it.

The “crisis” was never about them leaving. For a lot of these people, the crisis was the years before where they knew something wasn’t right and kept showing up anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Moving was the end of the crisis and not the beginning of one.

The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad; what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.

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When it comes to moving abroad, there are certain things available for you like visa subreddits and facebook expat groups, but none of these things mention a romantic partner.

Think about how we talk about relationships and moving in the same breath or rather, how we don’t. When someone moves abroad for love we call it romantic, but what doesn’t get talked about is what happens six months later when the relationship that relocated you falls apart and you’re standing in a foreign city with a lease, a half-built life, and no exit plan that doesn’t feel like failure.

Roamer 16 knows exactly what that feels like. She moved from Germany to Sweden for a man and that relationship lasted a year after she arrived. But she stayed anyway — she had a son in school and a job. Then she met someone else, married him, followed him to Spain for an Interpol project because her job let her work from anywhere and it made sense until he decided he was more interested in other women.

We don’t say this enough but romantic partners don’t just affect you emotionally when you decide to move abroad. They determine what version of a foreign country you actually get to access.

Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway. She had one Norwegian friend and she said it herself, that if her partner had been Norwegian, it would have been a completely different life. A different country, almost. She would have been able to experience Norwegian dinners, Norwegian family, the inside of a culture that otherwise keeps its doors shut to outsiders. Without that, you’re living alongside a place rather than inside it.

We see this performed constantly online. The couple that moves to Italy and integrates seamlessly because one of them is Italian. The American girl who moves to France for a French boyfriend and is suddenly eating her lunch in two hours and wearing better shoes. We romanticize it. We follow their content. We don’t really ask or wonder what it means — that your access to a place, your experience of its culture, your ability to feel at home in it, is often contingent on who you’re sleeping with.

Roamer 17 has moved countries twice for love—Romania to Italy at 22 for a boyfriend who decided he was going there for work. Later, she moved from Italy to Spain for another man. Both relationships ended and she is now planning her third move to Costa Rica for a relationship that has existed entirely on a screen for four years. She has never been in the same country as this man, yet she is moving continents for him.

When I think about how the internet would react to that — the think pieces, the comments, the women in the comments telling her she’s being naive — I think about how confidently we’ve decided that moving abroad for love is either the most romantic thing a person can do or evidence of poor judgment. There’s no in between.

The couple’s content gets half a million likes.

The “I followed a man to another country and it didn’t work out” content gets a different kind of attention.

What we don’t really sit with is that both of those people made the same decision. They just got different outcomes. And yet, we judge the decision by the outcome, which is a completely backwards way to think about any of this.

The infrastructure around moving abroad treats it as a solo logistical problem that two people happen to be doing at the same time. It doesn’t account for the fact that you are making a decision that will restructure your daily life, support system, sense of home and doing it with or because of or in spite of another person who has their own fears and ambitions.

This isn’t something a Facebook expat group can solve. If it goes wrong, the fallout isn’t just emotional—It’s logistical and financial. It’s: whose name is on the lease, whose visa is dependent on whose employment, who has to leave the country they’ve built a life in because the relationship that made it possible just ended.

I don’t think the right question is if you have a partner or not. It should be about what role they’re playing in the move and whether you’ve actually talked about that honestly.

Are they the reason you’re going? Are they coming with you? Are they staying behind and hoping the relationship survives the distance? Are they the reason you need to leave? Is the move an adventure you’re both choosing or a compromise one of you is making? What happens to the relationship if the country doesn’t work out? What happens to the country if the relationship doesn’t?

Nobody asks these questions in the planning stage. They’re too uncomfortable and uncertain. It is like admitting that love is a variable you can’t control in a process you’re desperately trying to make controllable.

But it is a variable and until we start treating it like one in the conversations, in the guides, in the communities built around helping people move, we’re going to keep sending people into one of the biggest decisions of their lives missing the most important piece of information.

Which is: who is this person to you, really? And what are you prepared for if that changes?

The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad; what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.

Not romantic love exclusively, though there’s plenty of that in this story. Love as the thing that moves you, pulls you somewhere new, makes you look at a map and think “why not.” She left Romania for Italy at 22 because her boyfriend decided he was going there for work and, one month later, she decided she was following him. She left Italy for Spain for another man. She’s planning to leave Spain for Costa Rica for a relationship that’s been running across four years and two continents entirely over a screen.

Every time, people probably thought she was being impulsive. But she thinks she was being exactly herself.

Milan, 2008, with nothing but a language degree and a boyfriend

She’d studied English, French and Italian since she was a child, which made the decision to move to Milan feel more logical than it probably was. Speaking a language and living in it are two different things and she found that out quickly.

“It doesn’t matter how much you study. Until you live there and interact with people in their own language day after day, you don’t realize what it is to actually speak a foreign language.”

She was 22 or 23, fresh out of university with barely a year of work experience, surrounded by Italian and figuring it out in real time. She had no contacts, no job and no established life. Just a boyfriend who’d gone ahead and a decision she’d made in a month.

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The job search was hard. Finding housing was harder. But something kept happening that she hadn’t fully expected: people were kind.

Her first rent in Italy came through an act of generosity she still talks about. The landlords had a daughter roughly her age who had also moved abroad. They looked at Roamer 17 — young, foreign, without the deposit — and decided to help her because they hoped someone would do the same for their daughter someday.

“Starting with that, it gives you confidence in people that actually don’t speak your mother language and still can be good to you.”

She was young, inexperienced and, as a woman alone in a foreign country, more than a little afraid. That one act of kindness from strangers built something in her that didn’t go away. She believes that what you put out into the world is what you get back.

She also has a theory about why kindness feels rarer now than it used to. It’s not that people are worse. It’s that they’ve stopped seeing each other.

“People don’t interact face to face anymore. Everything is done through Facebook, through the internet, through phone messages. It’s all very impersonal. You need to hear the person. You need to see the person to feel and get on the same vibe. Otherwise I think it’s impossible.”

Italy to Spain.

The relationship that brought her to Milan eventually ended. Then came another man, and another country. She moved from Italy to Spain, and the cultural whiplash was immediate.

Milan was different. The architecture, the fashion, the way people dressed and carried themselves felt elevated.

Spain was different too. “People are less elegant. I used to live in Milan, where it represents the elegance and high couture of everything — the buildings, the dressing, the perfumes, the makeup and hair. And you come here and you live a kilometer from the beach.”

She’s careful not to frame it as a criticism though. Spain has things Milan doesn’t — 300 days of sun a year, the sea always in view, a warmth in people that Italy’s politeness didn’t quite replicate. But the loudness was an adjustment. The lack of privacy. The way strangers would greet her with three kisses on the first meeting, which felt completely foreign to someone from Romania, from the Balkans, where physical affection between people who don’t know each other simply isn’t done that way.

“Everything is very loud, very there in front of you. No privacy. Just people kissing each other all day.”

Eight years stuck, and then a 30-kilometer drive that changed everything.

She settled in a town on the Spanish coast because that’s where her partner’s sister lived. She got her residency there, found work there, built her entire life in one place and then stayed for eight years, long after the reasons that had brought her there had dissolved.

Two years ago, she looked at her rent, looked at the town, and made a decision. She drove 30 kilometers down the coast to a place she’d never been, where she knew nobody, and moved.

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The difference was striking. Spain’s coastal towns have distinct personalities shaped by the nationalities that have settled in them — English here, German there. Her new town had German roots. They were organised, clean and quiet. On Sundays, even the motorcycles were electric. People rode bikes in silence. The contrast with where she’d been was almost comic.

She’s 43 now and she says she likes it. “I’m 43. I like my peace and quiet now. I’m done. I’ve done a lot.”

The language is always the hardest part

Roamer 17 speaks Romanian, English, French, Italian and now Spanish. She arrived in Spain without knowing anything about the language. Her first task after that first summer was getting a driving licence, which required passing a written test she couldn’t yet read.

She walked into a driving school and asked for the manual. “They said, can you speak? Can you read? No. So how are you going to do it? I said, just give me the manual. I’ll figure it out.”

A year later, she had her license.

This is her consistent approach to every barrier the moves have thrown at her. It isn’t easy, but she figures it out.

She’s also spent years traveling alone through the Canary Islands, Austria for a lake she found on Google Maps, Bonn just because of something she read about Beethoven’s house, Switzerland, Germany.

Roamer 17 has been drawn to Costa Rica for a while. The “pura vida” philosophy(pure life) resonates with something in her and also the fact that the country abolished its military in 1948 and has lived without one ever since. And something more personal: she was adopted at three years old, grew up with more than many children could ask for in a lifetime, and has decided that the next chapter needs to involve giving something back.

She wants to open a language school for children. She speaks enough languages to teach several of them, and she has the kind of life experience that makes her understand what it means to get to somewhere new without the tools to communicate.

“I received more than a lot of kids could ask for in this lifetime. So I decided I want to give back to the kids.”

What she’d tell anyone thinking about doing any of this

Roamer 17 doesn’t dress this up. The language barrier is hard, there’s lots of paperwork and you feel lonely when you get to somewhere new. She’s cried through bureaucracy, rebuilt from scratch more than once, and spent years in a country she moved to for a man who wasn’t there anymore. But she’s never once seen any of it as a mistake.

The people who helped her along the way — the landlords in Milan, the colleagues who taught her things through Google Translate, the strangers who were kind when they didn’t have to be — those are what she carries. She tries not to think about the relationships that ended or the bureaucracy. She thinks about the kindness that made her survive through it all.

Roamer 17 is a Romanian expat who has lived in Spain for over a decade, having previously lived in Italy. She is currently planning a move to Costa Rica, where she intends to open a language school. She is one of many expats interviewed as part of an ongoing project exploring what it really takes to build a life somewhere new.

She was born and raised in Germany, and thirteen years ago she left for Sweden. A long-distance relationship with a Swedish man had survived two years of back-and-forth flights to Stockholm before she finally decided to just go. The move itself was straightforward — EU freedom of movement meant no visa, no bureaucratic mountain to climb. She moved in with her partner, stayed three months on automatic right of residence, found a job, got her personal number and that was essentially it.

“As soon as you have your personal number, you’re registered, you’re insured. It is made very easy. In Sweden, everything is digital.”

Tax returns are done by text message. A bank ID on her phone is linked to her personal number, usable for everything from mortgage applications to identity verification. The entire administrative infrastructure of a country, accessible from the palm of your hand.

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She came from Germany, which she describes without hesitation as a jungle of bureaucracy. Sweden was the opposite of everything she’d known. And when she thinks about going back to Germany now, the answer is immediate: “Never, never again.”

The relationship that brought her to Sweden lasted one more year after she arrived. But by then, something else had taken root. She had a son — eleven years old when they moved. He had a school he was going to, he had friends, he had a life.

She had landed a good job in the FinTech industry. So she stayed, not because she’d planned to, but because leaving would have meant dismantling something that was genuinely good.

And Sweden was good. Particularly for a single mother, which is what she was. In Germany, she’d worked four jobs just to keep herself and her son afloat. Sweden made it possible to live on one. It made it possible to travel and actually show her son the world rather than spending every hour just keeping the lights on.

But the cold was hellish and Swedes are not the warmest people. But the systems worked, the support was there and for a woman raising a child alone, that mattered more than the weather or the people.

Roamer 16 met someone and got married. Her husband got pulled into a project with Interpol in southern Spain — a serious operation focused on the drug trafficking and crime coming through the region. She was working for a FinTech company that allowed her to work from anywhere in the world, so the decision made sense—hey moved to Spain together, planning to stay only temporarily. Then her husband decided he was more interested in other women. She was left in Spain with a broken heart, a rented-out house back in Sweden and a choice to make. She decided to go back to Sweden. “We women, we are capable. We can do our stuff on our own. And I think it always turns out to be a blessing.”

Her son stayed in Sweden. He had his friends, his life, his career — he’s training as a baker now, happy, and—she adds with obvious amusement—hates the sun. The opposite of his mother in almost every way. She knew Sweden had been the right place for him, even if it was no longer the right place for her.

Roamer 16 had been to Spain and Majorca, Alicante — the German tourist circuit. None of it had moved her. She’d always imagined herself ending up somewhere tropical like Central or South America. She’d looked seriously at Costa Rica.

Then she arrived in Málaga. “The first time I ended up here, I arrived in Málaga. I fell in love. I knew this is my place.”

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She’s struggled since to explain exactly why. The warmth of the people is part of it — the way a woman at a bakery who has never seen you before will call you “cariña”, the automatic tenderness of strangers. The geography is part of it too: ocean on one side, mountains on the other. She grew up in the mountains and he’d always wanted to be near the ocean. In Málaga, she has both.

Before Spain, she was leaving Sweden four times a year easily, always restless, always somewhere. Since arriving in Málaga, she says, the desire to travel has simply gone.

“I do not have any desire to travel. It’s gone.”

I honestly think that means a lot for someone who spent thirteen years moving between countries.

And then there’s the other side of Spain. Sweden was digital, seamless, logical. Spain is — and she says this having also lived in Germany, which is no model of efficiency — worse.

“I have left offices, crying and frustrated. It’s not easy. You need to be very resilient. There’s a lot of things getting in your way.”

She’s currently dealing with the process of changing her driver’s license. It’s German, registered under her maiden name, and she’s been using her married name in Spain which she kept after the divorce because it simply made life easier to navigate here. For this, she’s had to hire an “asesoría”, an official legal and administrative firm, to help her push it through.

For other things, she’s done it herself. Her social security number, for example — firms were offering to handle it for fees ranging from 125 to 600 euros depending on how much help you wanted. She did it herself online in three hours for nothing.

Roamer 16 also noted the way laws change constantly in Spain. What you need one month is different from what you need the next, which makes the advice you find in Facebook groups quickly outdated and means every case really does have to be navigated individually. She uses ChatGPT, she uses Facebook groups for general orientation and she leans on her FinTech background to push through what she can herself. But she’s realistic: some things require professional help, and the system’s opacity makes it nearly impossible to know in advance which things those are.

Roamer 16 spent her career in FinTech, most recently as an executive assistant to two CEOs — a job she describes as being “24/7 available for your CEO. They’re like children.”

She wrote complete travel guides for them. Exact links, precise times for public transport, which route was faster, every detail mapped out in advance so nothing could go wrong. She is not interested in doing that again.

The industry has changed anyway. Layoffs everywhere, constant pressure, salary compression for people her age. She’s approaching her 50s and the FinTech world, which once rewarded her expertise, is now pushing back on what it’s willing to pay for it. Sixty-hour weeks were standard. In Sweden, she was on a contract. In Spain, the employee protections are genuinely strong — the working conditions are completely different from what she’d known in FinTech.

She’s now working at a real estate agency in Spain, helping international clients navigate the process of buying property. Which means, among other things, helping them get the NIE number they need to purchase. She knows the system from both sides now: as someone who fought through it herself and as someone who helps others fight through it daily.

This is what she’d tell someone thinking about moving: “It’s not easy. Even if you succeed, it is not easy. You need to be very resilient.”

But she also wouldn’t change it. Not the cold years in Sweden that gave her son a real childhood or the heartbreak in Spain that turned into a life she loves. Not even the crying outside government offices, frustrated by a system that seems designed to exhaust you. She eventually found her place after all of that. So, it was worth it.

For now, Costa Rica is off the list. South America can wait. The mountains are behind her and the ocean is in front of her and a stranger at a bakery calls her “cariña” like she’s always belonged there.

Roamer 16 is a German expat who has lived in Spain for several years after a decade in Sweden. She works in real estate in southern Spain and is currently navigating the Spanish bureaucratic system with the same resilience she’s applied to everything else. She is one of many expats interviewed as part of an ongoing project exploring what it really takes to build a life somewhere new.

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He calls it a core life crisis. He had to reckon with the fact that the life he'd built on paper wasn't the life he wanted to live. So he left.

When he was a kid on a family holiday in Venice, he watched his parents skip the gondola ride they'd talked about for years because they had waited too long and their bodies couldn't do it anymore.

"They spent their whole life saying they were going to go to Venice and do it. But they waited too long. Their bodies were too old and too frail.”

So, when 2025 brought the loss of a few important people, he realized life is short.

When it comes to careers, he doesn't really believe in them anymore. At least not in the traditional sense. Especially when the previous generation's playbook which was start at the bottom, work your way up — no longer applies. People are going to be working until 70 anyway. If you have 40 years of work ahead of you, he figures you can afford to start your career at 30 instead of 22. Which means your 20s are for something else.

"I think you should take a bit of risk in your 20s."

Roamer 15 had savings. He was living at home for years, so he'd built up a cushion, a safety net sitting untouched in a bank account back in England.

"I wanted to do the move and challenge myself with only the bare minimum — around 4,000 British pounds. Surprisingly, I've managed to make it work."

That choice was intentional. Authenticity is something he cares about deeply and he didn't want to move in a dishonest way. Anyone can relocate to Australia in a luxury Airbnb with a full financial buffer. That's not the story he wanted to tell  to his audience or to himself. He wanted to know if it could actually be done on almost nothing. So that's what he tried.

Australia made sense for the practical reasons. Especially for most young British people. It was english-speaking, easy to get a working holiday visa and familiar enough. But the working holiday visa limits you to six months with any single employer, which shuts you out of anything that requires real commitment from a company. No employer is hiring someone for six months when they can hire someone who can stay. Hospitality and bar work are the practical options. What he also knew was that the Gold Coast — where he landed — wasn't quite what he'd imagined.

He'd done his homework. Facebook groups, Google, YouTube videos, detailed ChatGPT prompts listing exactly what he wanted in an area. He'd watched TikToks about different parts of the Gold Coast.

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But when he got there, he felt it wasn't quite right.

"I don't think the Gold Coast is my forever home. I wouldn't say I've fallen in love with it."

He came to the realization that choosing a place from research and actually living in it are two different things. It was a gap no amount of preparation fully closes. The plan now is to leave his hospitality job in January, travel around Australia properly, and then decide: a second year here, or New Zealand, or something else entirely.

When he first got to Australia, while searching for a job, Roamer 15 packed one cheap suit, got in the shower and tried to steam the wrinkles out in the room. He put it on anyway, walked into four hotels with a big smile, asked for whoever was hiring and led with his five-star experience.

All four wanted an interview. He had a job within three days.

"I had confidence because I had previous five-star luxury experience. I knew I'd pick up a role pretty quick."

The timing helped too. He moved in September, which he describes as early in the Australian spring, before the summer rush. Hotels were actively building their teams for the season. The accommodation he found was a cheap room with no windows, but it was in a convenient location and meant he didn't need a car.

He's written a 47-page guide on how to move to Australia and timing is one of the central arguments in it. Move in December or January and you're competing with everyone. Move a few months earlier and you get the jobs, the rooms, the footing — before the wave of arrivals washes through.

But he's honest about something else too. His move was easier than most.

"I am privileged. I am a white male who speaks English as a native language."

Working in hospitality put him alongside people for whom the exact same move looked completely different. Colleagues from different countries, different ethnicities, English not their first language. He spent months working in housekeeping with people he could only communicate with through Google Translate, and what he learned through that process stayed with him.

One of them had been an electrician back in India. He was qualified, experienced and skilled. But because he couldn't speak English, he was cleaning hotel rooms and the painful part was that England actually needed electricians.

"I thought that's a real shame. Because England needs electricians and if only he could do that, then, you know, it'd be great."

The bureaucratic side had its own surprises. When he applied for Medicare, his passport wasn't enough to prove prior UK residency. He needed additional documentation he hadn't anticipated. These are the small things that nobody thinks to mention until they're standing in a government office being told they're missing something.

For the visa and residency processes broadly, he's clear on two things: job hunting and accommodation are the two biggest stressors and they're also the two things he'd most want help with if he could hand anything off. There are companies that package all the setup — bank accounts, tax file numbers, the administrative groundwork — but that wasn't an option on his budget. He did it himself, documented every mistake and wrote it all into the guide so other people don't have to repeat them.

He also noted that Australia doesn't have what Europe has. He grew up surrounded by museums,  different cultures bleeding into each other, centuries of history, food and tradition everywhere. He didn't know how much that had shaped him until it was gone. He'd hated museums as a kid. Only now does he understand they were doing something to him the whole time.

"There is no culture here, really. I say to people, it was good to come here for live music. I'm like, yeah. What do you do on Christmas? What are your traditions? Just go to the beach?”

Australia is sunny, easy and functional. But it isn't Europe and he misses Europe in a way he didn't expect to.

He's also noticed something about the friendships. Australians have a reputation for being difficult to get close to. He's met people through work and through his housemates, but he hasn't built the friendship group he imagined. He's honest about that on his social media too, because he thinks it's important not to sell a version of this that isn't real.

"I wouldn't say it's been a fairy tale. I thought I'd move over, form a big friendship group and get a hot surfer girlfriend or something like that."

Part of the social difficulty is his schedule. He works in hospitality and creates social media content, which leaves maybe two free hours in the day. He can't commit to a football club because his rota changes. But some of it is also the place itself and the fact that Australians are so used to people cycling through that they've stopped investing in connections that won't last.

A few weeks before this interview, something happened to him that he hadn't anticipated.

He looked at his life in Australia. He had few close friends. He was still working in hospitality. The only real difference from London was that it was sunnier.

"So that's why I've thought, okay, I need to make a change again."

The plan is a secondhand van, a cheap air mattress in the back, money earned from his job and nothing else. He wants to travel Australia the same way he moved there — rough, real, and forced into conversations with strangers. He's seen what happens when you stay in a hostel versus a hotel and when you travel on almost nothing versus on a cushion. The cheaper version always produces better stories, better people, better tips on where to go and what to avoid.

"When you do it cheap and rough, you have to talk to people."

Roamer 15 has thought a lot about his generation. Housing is unaffordable, job prospects are poor and the playbook their parents handed them doesn't work anymore. The people who bought houses and held them for four years are now running countries, assuming that's all it ever took. It isn't. Not anymore.

But the best advice he's been given didn't come from a career coach or a YouTube video. It came from his father.

"Have a crisis now, get it all out the way. So then when you do have a wife and a kid and a house, you don't just leave them and move to Australia."

He's going back to the UK briefly for his mum's 60th birthday. He thinks it'll give him perspective on whether he wants to be back in Europe, or if the trip confirms that Australia, for all its imperfections, is still where he wants to be. He genuinely doesn't know yet.

But he is doing this alone with a growing social media following and a 47-page guide that exists because he made every mistake first and wanted to make sure someone else didn't have to.

"It always works out. You just have to find a way."

Roamer 15 is a British expat currently based on the Gold Coast, Australia, having moved from England six months ago. He documents his experience on social media and has published a free guide on moving to Australia. He is one of many expats interviewed as part of an ongoing project exploring what it really takes to build a life somewhere new.

He was in the military — Army aviation and got hurt on deployment. The military medically retired him, which is supposed to be a clean process, but it was anything other than that.

The process is slow, bureaucratic and deeply disorienting. You know you're getting out, you just have no idea when.

"You're in limbo," he says. "I'm looking for a job online but I can't say when I can start. It could be a month from now. It could be six months from now. No idea."

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So while the paperwork wound its way up and back down through the system, he and his wife started looking. New Zealand was the first option. As an aviation mechanic, he knew that places like Dubai and the UAE paid significantly better than the States and New Zealand had a formal program specifically designed to attract skilled workers in critical fields like aviation, helping with visas, household goods, the whole process. They were seriously looking into it. Then a banner ad changed everything.

How a sidebar ad led to ten years in Central America.

"One of those little banners that pops up on the side of the webpage as you're going through things — it said like, top 10 places to retire, top 10 safest places to retire, something to that effect and Nicaragua was high up on the list."

They were from Southern California. Hispanic culture wasn't foreign to them. So, they figured they'd give it six months and see.

Six months turned into three years of border runs — entering on a 90-day tourist visa, extending for another 90, then leaving the country entirely and re-entering to reset the clock. Back and forth, back and forth, until they finally asked why they were still doing that when they clearly weren't leaving. They applied for residency, got it and Nicaragua was home.

That is, until 2018.

In 2018, the Nicaraguan government changed Social Security laws — people would pay more in and get less out. The public pushed back hard. Roadblocks went up across the country, targeting commercial traffic and trucks moving goods in and out.

"The school bus, the buses that transport everybody, they're getting caught up in these roadblocks and the teachers couldn't come to school."

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When the teachers stopped coming, the decision was made. They had two young kids who had to go to school. So, they packed up and moved to Mexico.

Mexico was fine. Beachside living, plenty of other expats around — in fact, more gringos than they'd ever had in Nicaragua, which gave him a front-row seat to something he'd later turn into his most important piece of advice. But the heat was brutal. The humidity was relentless and it just wasn't their thing.

Then COVID hit, and they moved back to the States—Vegas.

Vegas made sense on paper. Family was in the States, their kids were getting older. They got new jobs. They adjusted, but they didn't like it enough.

"We're both working, not living the same quality of life we did down there. We're like, why are we working so hard to just get by when we could not work and live nice?"

They started saving to go back to Nicaragua permanently.

The second move came with a second residency application, and this time they knew what they were walking into.

Nicaragua has a retirement residency program, but it specifies age 65 and above, with proof of pension or income. He was medically retired from the military, under 65, and had to apply for an exception. But no one told them that upfront. No one told them much of anything literally.

"When you go to immigration, they're not well versed on it. They deal with tourist visas and passports for the locals. Not all immigration people are well versed on what you need like getting your residency.”

They made multiple trips to the capital and each time, they found out they were missing paperwork. They'd go back, gather more documents, return. At one point, after months of this, a woman at the immigration office handed them a piece of paper with a simple checklist of everything required.

"I was like, well, that would have been helpful to find anywhere, you know, for months."

The paperwork itself was a stressful process. Birth certificates and marriage certificates have to be apostilled — officially certified — and the apostille has to be recent. His birth certificate, issued in California, had to be sent to the California Secretary of State, translated, apostilled, then shipped to Nicaragua, all within the 30 to 60 day validity window. With government agencies and international shipping both in the equation, timing becomes everything.

"You have to have it all timed, especially because you're relying on other people in government agencies. You don't know how long it takes them to ship it out."

They did a lot of FedEx overnight just to buy themselves extra time.

The second time around, they hired an immigration lawyer. The lawyer gathered the paperwork, pushed it through, and told them when to show up. That was it.

"It was a chore," he says. "But once it's done, it's done."

In Mexico, surrounded by expats, Roamer 14 saw a pattern.

People would arrive full of excitement, buy a house on the beach, then leave.

"A lot of people moving to Mexico, buying a house on the beach, and they get there, and they just don't vibe. They spend a lot of money and then they end up moving back."

He said that maybe they weren't ready to actually give up who they were.

"Culture shock. For example, emaciated dogs and cats in the street — if you can't handle seeing it, it's rough. For Americans or Canadians, they come down and they see tons of street dogs eating trash and they're skinny. A lot of people just aren't used to seeing that kind of stuff."

He's honest that it's hard for him too sometimes. They have animals on the farm and their animals are family. But that's not how animals are universally treated in Nicaragua, and you see it.

"It's even hard for me sometimes to see animals in the streets. It's sad.”

The point isn't that one way is right and one is wrong. The point is: you need to know what you're actually walking into before you commit.

Roamer 14 advice is simple: “rent for six months to two years before you buy anything. Travel around the country. Find out what parts work for you and what parts don't. Let the place show you who it actually is before you decide it's for you first, before you make a permanent decision."

Roamer 14 runs a farm now. Avocados, mandarins, various fruits — mostly sold, though whatever's left goes to the house and to his workers. He has chickens in the yard, a pig that gets the kitchen scraps, goats, sheep. A couple of guys who take care of the property and a housekeeper who takes care of the house.

He doesn't work. At least not in the conventional sense.

"We go to the beach when we want, go down to the lake, have plenty of money left over and not live such a stressful life."

He's not closing the door on anywhere else either. Vietnam and the Philippines are on his list to visit. They were military, so, bouncing around comes naturally to him and his wife. But for now, this is home.

It's a long way from Vegas, longer way from Afghanistan and exactly where a banner ad on a webpage accidentally pointed him, more than ten years ago.

Roamer 14 is a medically retired U.S. Army veteran who has lived in Nicaragua for the better part of a decade, with stints in Mexico and Las Vegas in between. He now runs a small farm outside the tourist areas of Nicaragua and has no immediate plans to leave. He is one of many expats interviewed as part of an ongoing project exploring what it really takes to build a life somewhere new.

"Norway is a good country to make fast and easy money," she says. "If you don't have family, if you're alone and you just work, work, work, it's really easy to make a lot of money. Coming from Spain, the difference is like three times."

So she stayed. First for a year, then five, then fifteen.

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Leaving her family was hard, yes. But she also missed what she left behind like how people in Spain spill out into the streets in the middle of the night on a random day, families with small kids still out, nobody drunk, the way strangers pull you into conversation like they've known you for years and the warmth in the air. Norway didn't have that.

After 15 years, she had one Norwegian friend. "All my friends were from South Europe, from South America," she says. "People like me."

She was happy, especially in the early years, before kids, when life was freedom, travel and a wide-open feeling. But happiness and belonging aren't the same thing. At 40, she started asking herself a harder question: "What are my actual values? Is it money?" The answer was no and suddenly 15 years of financial stability looked different. "I was feeling like I was not living."

Between Norway and Spain came Sicily — a detour shaped by a relationship, a hope that maybe a Mediterranean island would feel closer to home. Her partner at the time was from Spain and Italy, so they tried it and it was beautiful. But beautiful and livable are two very different things.

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"You are really alone there," she says. "There is no state, there is no help, there is no government. So you are really alone. You need to fight a lot of things that you shouldn't be fighting because you are paying taxes, education, transport, garbage, service and you have nothing in return."

She described a place where the basic infrastructure you're supposed to be able to rely on simply doesn't exist. You pay in, nothing comes back and then on top of that, it's an island — which makes everything feel smaller, more contained, harder to escape when things get heavy.

Then there was the culture itself. "They are truly conservative," she says, flatly. "So no, no, thank you."

Coming back to Spain

She's been home since July and Spain, she notices, has changed. People are more polite, nobody smokes inside restaurants anymore, people don't throw rubbish on the street the way they used to, driving has gotten better. The European influence, maybe. But the core of it — the neighborliness, the sense that people actually want to show up for each other — that hasn't moved at all.

"I think we are good people. Really good neighbors and helping each other."

And it turns out the rest of the world agrees. People move to Spain from the Philippines, Russia, the US, Kazakhstan — from everywhere, chasing exactly what she spent 17 years away from. The culture, the family feel, a life that gives back what you pour into it.

Her daughters lived through Norway, Sicily, and now Spain. The younger one is small enough that she's just happy wherever she lands. The older one, at 12 and a half, is a different story.

She speaks Norwegian, Italian, and Spanish. She spent years in a Norwegian school system that doesn't give exams until age 13, and landed in a Spanish school where suddenly there are exams, grades and expectations, but she's getting really good grades.

What Roamer 13 wants you to know

She doesn't regret any of it. The years abroad taught her things about money,  friendships with other South Europeans and South Americans — other people who understood what it meant to chase opportunity somewhere cold and far.

But she has things to say to anyone standing at that crossroads right now.

”Be careful what you choose, but enjoy as much as you can, because it's always good and if you find yourself drowning, if you think you can't see the exit, don't make the mistake of thinking you're alone in it.There is always an exit, and always people willing to help you. We are not alone, and together, we are better."

Roamer 13 spent 17 years abroad mostly in Bergen, Norway, and briefly in Sicily before returning to Spain in 2024. She is one of many expats interviewed as part of an ongoing project exploring what it really takes to build a life somewhere new.

Shonda Rhimes basically raised me. We have a whole relationship. Every week, every season, from my couch, we talk about fear, love, friendship, politics and joy. She is, without question, a certified badass. Wonder Woman energy, full stop.

Now if you know anything about her or the book, 2014 Shonda would've physically broken into a sweat reading that. This was a Black woman, an African-American woman who had taken over Thursday night television while the world was still catching up to the fact that it was ready for her and then kept showing up week after week until they proved it.

Despite all of it — the empire, the cultural footprint, the whole Shondaland thing — she would've immediately started deflecting. Too busy hoping nobody was looking directly at her to even register the applause, let alone say thank you and smile for it.

2025 Shonda though? Completely different woman. She doesn't just take the compliment, she owns it and that didn't happen by accident. That happened because of the “Year of Yes” and hard work that doesn't reward you quickly or hand you a trophy for showing up. The kind that completely rewires who you are if you let it.

Shonda, genuinely, you are a hero. Not just to me, but to every woman of every shape, size, color, background, field, and age who needed to see someone like you to do what you did.

You became who you deserved to be and you worked your ass off to get there.

Shonda is to me what Oprah is to Shonda.

The plot of the whole book, “Year of Yes” is to say yes to the things that scare you and then Shonda shows you what happened when she actually did it — what one word did to the entire shape of her life.

She called out three things in me that I'm genuinely not proud of:

One: I've been hiding.

Two: We all need a Cristina.

Three: Badassery is a word and a practice.

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The thing about a book like this is that it's very easy to read it, cry, feel genuinely moved all the way to your core, and then slide it back onto the shelf where it sits and gathers dust. You walk past it sometimes and feel that warmth again, that thing that rose in your chest when you were reading, and then you remember you were doing something and you go back to it and the thing you were doing is never actually that important.

But halfway through this one I hit something that stopped me cold. I have been mixing up conviction and confidence my entire life.

They are not the same thing. Conviction? I have it in embarrassing quantities. Put me in front of something and I will stand there, chest out, feet planted, and say exactly what I think. I was raised to survive, to drag myself forward, to outwork anyone in the room because I grew up with less than most of the people in it. Conviction doesn't wait to be called. It just shows up. It's the loud thing, the fight thing, survival in a blazer pretending to be a personality trait.

Confidence is quieter than that. Confidence doesn't need to earn its place or argue for it. It just walks in already knowing it belongs. I don't think I've ever walked into a room like that. Not once.

My entire wardrobe is black. Every piece of clothing I own, every shirt, every dress, every coat — black. People can call it chic, minimal or timeless, if they're being generous.

I’ve come to realize it’s a camouflage. Black doesn't demand anything from the room. It lets you take up space without announcing it. It lets you stand there and be seen without actually being looked at and if I'm being honest, that's exactly what I want. I want to be impossible to ignore without ever having to be visible. I want to impress people without being seen by them.

People who know me would tell you I'm outgoing, confident, sure of myself. But those are just fight responses that consistently beats a flight response. I fight my way through every single room. My friends do this thing on game nights where you vote on someone based on what a card says, and I get "could network at a funeral" every time, unanimously, without anyone having to think about it. They mean it as a compliment and I take it as one.

I have a big job. I talk to people with bigger ones. I've been introduced, out loud, as "the next generation of badass" — a sentence that should land as empowering but mostly makes me glance over my shoulder to figure out who they're actually describing. I've won awards, sat on panels, held my own in rooms that were historically not built for someone like me, but for the life of me, I cannot take a compliment. Not even a little. I laugh it off, redirect it and wave it away like it's a wasp flying at my face.

I think so many women live in this exact spot. The gap between what people see when they look at you and what you actually feel standing there. Between performing capability convincingly and that quiet persistent question of whether you're even allowed to want more than this. We get told we're resilient, impressive, efficient, reliable, competent. But none of those words mean free.

Shonda talks about the couch and the brownies. How comfortable comfortable gets, and how easy it is for it to eat your actual life without you noticing. Mine isn't brownies. Mine is strawberry ice cream, pint-sized, paired with whatever show can swallow me whole for forty-five minutes so I don't have to feel the low hum of “something is wrong.”

I get through the day and I numb the night. In my world, I call that being strong.

I am twice the size I was and half the person I used to think I was. Not entirely physically. Mostly in the way that Shonda meant when she described hiding inside her work so she never had to actually show up as herself.

I didn't know I was hiding until she described it. Because she'd been doing it too.

That's the thing about being a good hider. You do it long enough and it stops feeling like hiding. It starts feeling like personality. Like strength. Like “this is just who I am” and somewhere in there you stop seeing that who you are has quietly gotten very, very small.

We all need a Cristina Yang.

I finished the book on a plane home to Florida, in the aisle seat, crying. Shonda created the person she needed before she knew how to be her. She wrote Cristina Yang — Sandra Oh, brilliant and infamous, the one who dances it out with you in the kitchen in the middle of the night and also tells you the truth when you're actively begging her not to — because Cristina was who Shonda was too scared to be in real life. She lived inside that character until she could live inside herself.

I have spent years watching Cristina Yang, Olivia Pope, Meredith Grey and Annalise Keating. Women who are audacious, unapologetic, brilliant and unbothered about taking up space. I've watched them and felt something split open in my chest and I have been calling that feeling admiration.

But admiration isn't the same thing as doing it yourself. Watching someone be brave is not the same as choosing to be brave. They are completely different acts.

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I think a lot of us get stuck here. We fill our lives with the women we want to become — on screen, in books, in the Substacks we open before we're even fully awake and we call it inspiration. We let it feel warm and then we go back to surviving in black clothes that don't ask anything of anyone, including us. We watch other women expand and then we go home and fold ourselves smaller.

Shonda wrote Cristina because she needed a self that had already done it. Someone to borrow confidence from while she was still figuring out how to build her own.

I've been borrowing from Cristina for years. The difference is I never tried to return it. I watched her refuse to disappear and then I went home and wore black to disappear.

We all need a Cristina, as a person in your life, yes, but more importantly, as a voice inside you. The one that won't let you deflect the compliment. That won't let you run to the couch before you've even attempted that thing. That loves you enough to not let you call surviving the same thing as living.

If you don't have that voice yet, you can grow it slowly.

Badassery is a word and a practice.

Shonda added it to her Microsoft Word dictionary while she was writing this book and that detail is so perfectly her.

Badassery isn't about being perfect. It's about saying yes to the failure too, because failure is also where you find out you can get back up. It's the hard yes and the deliberate no. It's picking the uncomfortable thing on purpose, over and over, until discomfort starts to feel less like danger and more like proof that you're actually in your life rather than just moving through it.

I almost moved to Denver this year. I built a little checklist — mountains visible from the city, walkable, not actively hostile to women or queer people, a real airport. I signed a lease, wired a deposit and started telling people I was leaving Florida.

It felt like courage, but it wasn't. It was a new zip code, in the same country, same language, same everything. Just enough motion to feel like change without touching the actual structure of my life.

Conviction again. Adapt, fight, keep moving. Not confidence. Not expansion. Just me paying six thousand dollars to be a slightly different version of exactly who I already was, but with mountains.

Then the building turned out to be a nightmare — asbestos, break-ins, lease arrangements sketchy enough to be technically illegal. I fought my way out, got every dollar back, felt like I'd won something. Look at me, competently navigating disaster. And then my mom got the cancer call. Everything I'd been treating like it was urgent just collapsed inward.

In the time between doctors visits, scans, and picking this book back up, I realized I kept saying yes to the version of my life that feels handleable and no to the one that feels like it could actually be mine, because that version needs real confidence which I don't have.

Conviction works everywhere. You can fight through any room, any city, any circumstance. But confidence needs something conviction can't supply. It needs you to genuinely believe you deserve more than just getting through it. That wanting something big isn't the same as being irresponsible. That doing well isn't the same as living well. I lost the ability to tell the difference a while back.

There are things I have to do first. Get my mom through this, help my grandpa get divorced, say goodbye properly to friends and a city I've spent ten years in.

But I also know that I've been using timing as a hiding place, as an excuse. Yes, I've been competent, but I forgot to check whether I was actually happy or just very, very good at appearing functional.

Fighting through your life is not the same as being at home in it. Surviving well is not the same as living like you mean it and God, I have been so proud of how well I survive.

I'm scared to leave the US. I'm scared to leave the people who know me as the woman who networks at funerals, fights through rooms, wears black, keeps her head down, gets it done. I'm scared to find out who I am on the other side of having nothing left to fight through. But I'm more scared of being sixty and realizing I spent my whole life hiding instead of living. That I watched Cristina Yang dance it out in the kitchen a hundred times and never once stood up from the couch.

So I'm saying it here. I'm writing it here, so I can't quietly take it back later. I'm saying yes to the things that actually scare me.

Yes before I feel ready. Because Shonda showed me that ready is just a story fear tells itself to stay comfortable.

Fuck. Okay… time to get my shit together.

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When a woman follows that pull, we don't reach for a sympathetic word. We reach for the harshest one we have.

Let me tell you about Roamer six

She left Russia with one suitcase and one backpack. She left when the war started and her translation business collapsed overnight. She left knowing her husband wouldn't come. She left knowing her son — not yet eighteen, not yet legally his own person — couldn't follow.

She packed her things, got on a plane, and went to Cancun. She had never been there. She knew almost no one. But as fate or luck would have it, within weeks she had a job, an apartment, a best friend whose grandmother now screens all her boyfriends and eventually a fiancé — a Mexican man, just like the one she'd imagined marrying since she was four years old watching telenovelas with her grandmother.

Her son is still in Russia. His father won't let him visit. He's afraid the boy will want to stay.

When I finished that interview, I couldn't stop thinking about something. What do we call a woman who leaves not because she doesn't love her child, but because something in her knows she'll disappear if she doesn't go?

The word we reach for is "abandon."

Before you know the circumstances, before you know why she was leaving or what she was leaving toward, you already decided on that word.

”She walked away. She chose herself over her kid. She left her child behind.”

Every single phrase is pre-loaded with the same charge: selfish, unnatural, monstrous even. And underneath all of it is this myth — that women are inherently nurturing, that mothering is pure instinct, that a good mother would never. So when a woman's behavior doesn't fit it, we don't question the myth. We just reach for the harshest word available and call it honesty.

Research shows that children raised by single fathers do just as well as children raised by single mothers.

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I want you to think about this for a sec. If the harm to the child were really what this was about, then a father leaving and a mother leaving would carry the same weight. But they don't, do they? A father who moves abroad for work is providing. A father who builds a new life somewhere else is brave, starting over. We don't even have a story where a father leaves because something in him knows he'll disappear if he stays because we've never made fathers justify that feeling. We've never set a bar that high for them.

The bar only exists for mothers and it's set so high that the word “abandon” becomes inevitable no matter what she does or why she does it. Whatever she felt wasn't real enough. Whatever was pulling her should have been resisted. She should have stayed.

You see, the judgment isn't really about the child. It's about the audacity of a woman who wanted something badly enough to go get it. That's what we're actually punishing.

No one ever asks what happens to the child of a mother who stays past the point of her own survival.

That mother is still at school pickup. She's still making dinner. She's still physically there, doing all the things. But she's not there there. She's hollowed out. She's a woman going through the motions while something in her checked out a long time ago. We all know what that looks like. Some of us grew up next to it.

We never call that abandonment. We never talk about her staying the way we talk about her leaving. We never ask what it actually costs a child to grow up beside a mother who wasn't emotionally and mentally present.

The harm to a child when their mother leaves isn't only from the leaving itself.

A huge part of it comes from the story the culture immediately starts telling about it.

It's every person who says “abandoned” when they mean “left”. It's the shame that gets stitched into the child's origin story before they're old enough to question any of it. It's the verdict delivered in a single word before the child has any tools to form their own understanding.

We wound the child with our language and then we point to the wound as proof the mother was wrong to go.

Roamer six spoke Spanish to her son from the day he was born. It wasn't her native language. It was the language she grew up listening to in those telenovelas and the hacienda she'd been dreaming about since she was tiny. She planted it in him before she knew she was going to need it. Before the war. Before the business collapsed. Before she knew any distance was coming.

She was preparing him for a life she hadn't decided to build yet.

That is not abandonment. That is a woman who loved her child enough to give him a way to find her. Who knew, on some level she couldn't have even articulated yet, that the pull was real and the distance was coming and her son would need a bridge across it.

We don't question the father who is actively keeping a son from his mother. Instead, we focus on the mother who left.

If you've felt the pull—if you've always felt it, if you're feeling it right now reading this, you've probably spent a long time telling yourself it isn't a good enough reason. That you should stay. That the word for what you want is “selfish”.

But it isn't. It might just be the most human thing there is which is wanting the life that was always meant to be yours.

We should probably find a better word for it. Before we lose any more women to the silence of staying somewhere they were never meant to be.

Sometimes it hits without warning, in the middle of a normal day and it doesn't feel like warmth — it feels like pressure. Like your body is grieving something your brain hasn't officially acknowledged yet.

I'll be fine and then suddenly I'll miss something so specific it almost has a physical location.

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Growing up, it was bonfires. I'd get a text “fire tonight” and that was all I needed to show up. I didn't ask what to bring or how long it would go or who else was coming. I just showed up and there they all were, and the fire was going. Someone's older sibling had made a liquor store run for beer that tasted terrible but nobody cared.

There's smoke in my hair for two days after. My eyes roam, half the night, waiting for a parent to appear and ruin everything. Laughing so hard at nothing that my stomach hurt.

The strange thing is I didn't have to look back to miss it. I started missing it while it was still happening.

There was a night right before I left for college. I was standing, surrounded by all of them, and I felt it. I felt happy but I was also grieving.

Like my body had clocked the ending before my mind would let me. I remember thinking, clearly, almost like a note to myself: “this is one of those moments. The kind people talk about later.”

I think about that night more than I probably should because of how it felt to be inside it. Like I hadn't had to earn my place there. Like existing was enough. Like just walking through the door was the whole qualification.

That's what I'm actually mourning when I feel this. Not the bonfires. Not even the people. But the way I didn't have to explain myself. I didn't have to start from scratch.

We still do it sometimes, those of us who are left. A dinner that runs too long. A bottle of wine that turns into two. A Saturday market where we wander and don't say much. A night where phones stay face down and nobody is performing and we just settle back into each other. Back into whatever it is we are when we're not trying to be anything.

But it's different now and I feel it even when I don't say it.

There's more catching up than living. More recounting than experiencing. We're narrating our separate lives to each other instead of building something together in real time. The connection is still real. It's just load-bearing in a different way now. It requires more maintenance, more intention, more choosing.

And I don't know exactly when that happened. I just know that it did.

My feelings have started to have much authority over my actual decisions.

If I miss them this much already, before I've even gone, doesn't that mean I belong here?

If imagining leaving makes something in my chest go tight, isn't that my answer?

If I miss something this much, it must be right. The ache must mean something.

But the longer I sit with it, the more that notion falls apart.

Because loving people has never required staying still and proximity has never been the same thing as closeness, even when it produces it.

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A lot of what felt so effortless back then worked because we didn't have to try. We were in the same place and the same season in life. We didn't have to choose each other across distance, time zones or entirely different versions of who we were becoming. We just showed up and proximity did the quiet labor of connection on our behalf.

That's what nostalgia keeps from you. How much of the magic was just because you were all together in the same place, in the same moment.

I love being chosen without effort. I love being known without having to explain myself. I love not having to rebuild myself from the ground up in front of people who don't have the context for who I used to be.

It's real comfort and I'm not dismissing it. But it's not proof of anything.

If I'm being honest, I don't think what I'm most afraid of is losing them.

I think what I'm afraid of is finding out what survives without proximity doing the work. Finding out what we actually are to each other when we stop being in the same place.

Because what if distance changes it?

What if we love each other genuinely and still don't fit into the same life anymore?

What if both of those things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other out?

There's a grief that lives in that question that feels almost disloyal to name. Like acknowledging it means I didn't value what we had.

Like I'm rearranging the past to justify wanting something different now.

But I don't think that's what's happening. I think this is just what it feels like when something real and meaningful doesn't follow you into the next part of your life because some things belong to specific seasons and the season is ending. Sometimes grief is just the price of growing past something that genuinely loved you back.

What I'm really afraid of, underneath all of it, is simpler and more embarrassing than I want to admit.

I'm afraid I won't be able to recreate this feeling somewhere else.

That the next connection I make will be thinner. That it'll take years to get to the part where someone can just show up at my door, walk into my kitchen, open the fridge without asking. That I'll spend a long time being impressive instead of just being known. That I'll have to earn my place everywhere I go for longer than I can stand.

Maybe that's true. Maybe it will be harder, slower and I'll have to build everything from scratch with people who don't have the history to understand why certain things are funny or why I relish the quiet.

But I don't actually know that.

What I do know is this—staying somewhere because it once held the last version of you is not the same as staying because it still does. And missing something is not evidence that it was right. It's just evidence that it was close. That it mattered. That you were present enough to feel it while it was happening.

I can carry all of it — the bonfires, the smoke, the way our laughs echoed through the neighbors yards — without letting it make my decisions for me.

We can love people without needing to live inside the version of life that made loving them so easy.

The past doesn't get to take control of the future. What we had was real and it was enough. It doesn't need to follow me everywhere to still have meant something.

We just have to be honest about what we're holding onto. Are we holding on because it feels right or because letting go is the scariest thing we've ever considered doing?

My plan was always to leave. Leave my home, my town, my country. To keep moving and to experience as many corners of the world as possible.

But there's just too much going on right now, you know? A new job. Family stuff. Plans already in motion. Responsibilities. Real life.

Everyone nods in agreement when I say that. Like of course it's not the right time. Of course it makes sense. Of course you can't just go. You can't leave your stability.

But I get this annoying twinge in my stomach every time I say this out loud. Why are you agreeing with me?

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I got the confirmation call about my mom's cancer on a random day. Out of the blue. I was on a work trip in New York. It was freezing. I was at some evening work outing when my phone rang. Not exactly the right setting for that kind of news — not that there's a right setting for that kind of news anyway.

With a sinking feeling in my heart, I ended the call, stepped away and started crying so much that I left.

But on the flight back home, I felt…relief.

Because now I had a reason. No one could go against it. Shit, I couldn't go against it. I mean, you don't leave when your mother is sick. That's not even a debate. That's just who you are — a good daughter, a present daughter, someone who shows up.

So, just like that, the door I'd been circling for years closed.

Having real reasons to stay make it almost impossible to be honest with yourself. I have reasonable reasons. My mother has cancer. My grandfather is ill. I have loads of family stuff going on right now. These are not things I invented. This is my life.

But I've noticed that I reach for these reasons a little too fast. I immediately start thinking of stuff I have to deal with and I exhale slowly.

The guilt is the hardest part to write about honestly. Well, the thing is it doesn't feel like guilt. It feels a whole lot like love— devotion, loyalty, being the kind of person who doesn't abandon people when things get hard. And I do love them. I genuinely, completely love them. That part is not the lie. But I've let that love answer questions it was never asked.

I've let it stand in for things I haven't said. I've used the people I love — their needs, their pain, as a reason not to have to look directly at what I want and ask myself the question I've been avoiding for years.

That's the part that makes me feels..uncomfortable with myself.

I look at my sick mother and somewhere underneath the love and the fear, there is a small, ugly, thought: “but what about me?”

But I don't dare say it out loud. Instead, I lean into the resentment I feel.

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I resent how hard this is. I resent that some people get to just…go. They get to leave and figure it out and the weight they leave behind is so much lighter than mine. I resent the heavy weight of obligation. I resent that I can see all of this so clearly and still can't move.

I resent myself most for understanding the whole mechanism and still letting it run.

When you stay, you're called “responsible, loyal, mature, grounded.”

Nobody pulls you aside and asks if you've really thought it through. Staying just happens and everyone quietly respects you for it.

Leaving is the thing that needs something like a thesis defense. Leaving needs a plan. It needs a timeline. You need to show that you haven't completely lost your mind. But even if you have all these sorted out, someone will still ask if it's really the right time and you'll feel the question hit that soft spot it always finds. Then you'll fold a little and wait for the right time which does not come.

Am I weird for thinking a lot of people feel the same way?

You want to leave, but you can't. You are stuck between the life you're reaching for and the life that needs you right here, right now. The guilt that feels like love. The way both of those things exist at the same time and neither one cancels the other out.

We're not bad people for wanting things. We're not bad daughters or bad friends for having a life full of longing that exists completely separately from how much we love the people we're staying for. But we treat it like we are. We swallow our desires and wanting, so no one questions whether we really love them.

There will always be something else. There is always something else. Life does not clear a path and step back and say — okay. Now. Nothing is in the way anymore. Go.

That moment doesn't exist. I think I've known that for longer than I've been willing to admit.

So I'm left with this question: How do you love people and still not lose yourself completely? How do you hold someone's hand through a difficult time while you keep your own hand free?

I don't know. I'm still here. I'm still saying it's not the right time. I still get that annoying twinge in my stomach every time everyone immediately agrees. I don't know how to deal with that, but I'm starting to think that twinge is the most honest thing about me right now and this story I’m telling myself about stability has less to do with safety and more to do with a crippling fear.

It was 2018, and he’d just returned from a holiday in France with his parents and younger brother. He’d been getting terrible chest pains, but he thought it was indigestion. His parents insisted on dropping him at the hospital in East London. He said it wasn’t necessary. They said it was and almost immediately, the hospital did an ECG. Then it was all panic stations.

They got him into an ambulance with a blue light and rushed him to a hospital in central London, famous for its heart division. He arrived at one in the morning. They tried to put a stent in but couldn’t get it in. He had multiple organ failure. What would normally be a 45-minute operation ended up taking four hours.

They put him in a coma and it was not looking good.

Two days later, his younger brother—who had been on that same holiday—had a different kind of heart attack. It also left him in a coma. But his brother was in a persistent vegetative state. He’d been without oxygen to his brain for some time.

When Roamer 12 finally woke up after some weeks and learned about this, it was all too much to take in.

After some months, the hospital had to ask for permission to let his brother go.

“It was a tough time for my family,” he tells me. “My dad, particularly, is a committed Catholic, and he said, ‘You’re asking me to kill my son.’ There is a way of looking at it like that. But the point was, he was never going to recover. Would he have wanted to spend 40 years in a hospice on a machine? I don’t think so. He was an active guy. That would not be a life he would have relished.”

After all of that—the near death, the loss, the grief—life seemed different. Priorities changed.

“The idea of getting on the tube in rush hour to go and do a job that I didn’t really care about... I just thought, what’s the point?”

So he decided to move to Spain.

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He doesn’t really know why he chose Spain. Could’ve been France. But he just wanted to live in Europe. He likes Europe.

He came out to Valencia for a few days with a mate. Loved it. Saw a flat and said, “I’ll take it. I need a month to get my crap together and move my stuff here.”

They said okay, we can wait a month.

He went home, booked a lorry to ship his furniture and everything, and started his new life in Spain.

That was six years ago.

In Valencia, they have a phrase: “pensati fet.” It’s Valenciano, the local dialect—a bit like Catalan. In Castellano Spanish, it would be “pensado y hecho.” In English... it doesn’t really exist. But it means something like “thought and did.” Thought about it and just did it.

You see it on shop names. People use it all the time. It’s a philosophy.

Roamer 12’s journey to Spain was pensati fet. He thought he’d do it, and he just did it.

He told his family at Christmas that he was moving to Spain that month. His daughter (he’s divorced) didn’t really have any reaction.

“Afterwards, I said to her, ‘You didn’t really have any reaction when I said I was moving to Spain. What do you think?’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s just you, isn’t it, Dad?’”

She reminded him: one day he announced he was going to drive a lorry to India and probably wouldn’t have internet or Wi-Fi, but he’d be fine. Off he went. Then he came back, and a few weeks later said he was going to Cuba for a month. Again, probably not much Wi-Fi, but he’d be fine.

“And now you say you’re moving to Spain. Well, what do you think I’m going to think? I’m going to think, yeah, right, you’ll be back in three months.”

Six years later, she’s had to eat her words. She’s 20 now and she’s been over loads of times. This month, she’s coming with his 92-year-old father.

It’ll be the first time his dad has visited.

“He doesn’t really like traveling, but I think he thinks he should try and see me before I die. Or before one of us dies, I should say.”

Roamer 12 moved to Spain in 2020 as a European citizen. The UK had just done this “batshit crazy thing” called Brexit—left the European Union in what he calls “a suicidal move whipped up by the right wing who made it all about immigration.”

“It’s got nothing to do with immigration,” he says. “Immigration has got much worse since Brexit. So even the reasons they gave for it are ludicrous.”

Now Brits are in the same position as Americans, Australians, whoever. No special rights in Europe. They need visas like everyone else.

But in 2020, the EU gave the UK a one-year extension because the UK “hadn’t got its shit together.” So Roamer 12 moved there as a European citizen. Now he has to renew his residency as a British citizen.

“If you know anything about Spain,” he says, “the bureaucracy is a nightmare. It’s like the 1950s here. Everything is on paper. You go to an office and they say, ‘Oh no, you didn’t want to come to this office. You wanted the one on the other side of town.’ Everything takes days. It’s just a nightmare.”

But he got in and now he’s applying for his Irish passport because his parents are Irish.

He called the passport office in Dublin. They said he needs a copy of his father’s marriage certificate.

“I said, ‘Well, my mum passed away two years ago, so I’m just going to apply under his birth certificate.’

Then they said, ‘No, you have to have a copy of his marriage certificate.’

I said, ‘That’s going to be really hard because he got married in the Vatican in Rome, and I don’t know where that is.’”

They insisted that he’d have to get the copy.

“I said, ‘If my mum is dead and we don’t have a copy, why can’t I just apply under his birth certificate? If he was married to somebody who wasn’t Irish, I’d still be entitled to it.’

And they said, “Yeah, but we know that he was married, and you need to have the marriage certificate to fill in the form.’”

I asked, ‘Can’t we make an exception?’

She said, ‘No. No exceptions.’”

His younger brother—the one who died—had the marriage certificate because he was going to get his Irish passport. But now Roamer 12 doesn’t know where it is.

“I said, ‘Well, thank you so much for your great humanity. It’s been an absolute pleasure dealing with you.’ Now I’ve got to write to the Vatican to ask for a copy of a marriage certificate for a ceremony that took place in 1964.”

About 18 months ago, Roamer 12 wasn’t feeling right. He didn’t really know what it was, so he took himself to the “urgencias”—the emergency room.

They ran a load of tests. A nephrologist (kidney specialist) came down to see him. Amazing woman.

“She said, ‘You are in kidney failure, and we have to admit you straight away and try and get your kidney rate up a little bit.’”

They succeeded in getting it up enough that he wouldn’t die immediately. But they said he’d need dialysis and they’d put him on the list for a kidney transplant.

Spain, interestingly, is the world’s leading country in terms of transplants performed. He looked into it: in 1980 or the late ‘70s, they brought in a law that unless you opt out, you’re giving presumed consent to donate your organs.

“That massively boosted the number,” he explains, “because most people don’t think they’re going to die.”

In the US and the UK, you have to opt in. And unless they know for sure, they won’t do anything. But if you have to opt out? Most people don’t bother. So the organ donation rate is significantly higher.

They got him on dialysis, which was problematic because he has incredibly thin veins. Trying to get a needle in was horrible. Blood everywhere. After about five to ten attempts, they said, “It’s just not working.”

They put a catheter into his jugular and his chest. Two portals going into him.

“I’m like a cyborg,” he laughs. “I’m like Robocop.”

The Spanish healthcare team was amazing. After he got the transplant, they kept him in for a couple of weeks. Then they let him go home. But they did a biopsy. He was on his way home when he got a phone call from the hospital saying he had to come back.

“I said, ‘You must be joking. I’m not coming back. I’ve just been there for two weeks.’ They said, ‘You have to come back. We just got the results of your biopsy.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not coming back.’ And I put the phone down.”

It rang again immediately. He ignored it. Then it rang a few minutes later. He answered.

It was his nephrologist, Sandra.

“She was talking to me like I was her child. I’m very close to Sandra. She said, ‘You’re an adult, you’re not a child, and your kidney is in rejection. So you do have to come back. But I understand it’s difficult for you. So if you like, go home, have a shower, make yourself a coffee, and then when you’re ready, get a taxi back to the hospital and we’ll deal with it.’”

So that’s what he did.

He got back to the hospital. The nurses said, “Yeah, you’re back.”

He said, “I was just at the point of escaping from this place, and they rang me and said I had to come back. This is not a hospital. This is a prison. You should call it Alcatraz or Devil’s Island because I can’t escape.”

They were laughing.

“It’s easy for you to laugh,” he told them.

They said they had to put him into isolation because he was in rejection and very prone to infections. He spent two months in isolation in the hospital.

“I’ve become incredibly close to my team of nurses. We were in contact every day. They’re just really lovely to me, and they send me messages all the time.”

When they found out he had to go back to the hospital recently because his blood pressure was high, he got emails saying, “Oh my God, we’ve heard. One foot in front of the other. You can do this. You’ve got this.”

All in Spanish. None of them speak English.

“I felt very supported and cared for and it’s all free.”

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Americans who move to Spain are shocked that healthcare is free.

“Healthcare is pretty much free everywhere in the world apart from the US,” Roamer 12 says. “You’re the exception.”

He explains that not all Americans have access to Spanish public health though. A lot move on what’s called a non-lucrative visa, which means you can live there but can’t work, and you have to pay tax on whatever money you bring. You can’t access public health unless you pay a waiver.

And it’s become controversial—Americans moving to Spain.

“We get a lot of people from California, bizarrely. What they’ll do is sell a property for like a million bucks or more—and a million is cheap in California. So they move here with a great big sack of money. As soon as somebody hears it’s an American buyer, the price goes up. And the Americans pay it. It’s causing a lot of bad blood because it’s distorting the market.”

There have been protests in Spain. Not just against Americans, but against what they call “guiris”—a rude word for North Europeans and Americans. White, wealthy people.

“The problem is, wages are a lot lower in Spain, so people can’t compete. If an American moves here and sees a nice apartment for half a million euros, that’s completely pie in the sky for Spanish people. Spanish people end up living at home with their parents till they’re in their 30s, 40s. It’s not fair.”

He doesn’t know what they can do about it, but he thinks they need to build more affordable housing. The law of supply and demand: when there’s little supply, it becomes expensive.

“If you’re a Spanish person selling your parents’ home and you can get half a million off an American or a quarter million off a Spaniard, you’re gonna go for the bigger amount. It’s human nature.”

Estate agents that specialize in expats have opened little boutique agencies run by Americans, and they’re really not popular. They’re seen as leading the market, helping Americans get property at the expense of ordinary Spanish people.

“It’s a complex issue,” he explains.

In various Facebook groups, Roamer 12 sees Americans asking things like, “Where can I buy corn syrup?”

Everyone’s like, “Why would you want to eat corn syrup? It’s banned in Europe. It’s poisonous shit.”

And they’re like, “Oh, I like it with my pancakes.”

“You’re not in America,” he says. “You know?”

There’s a shop in Valencia called The Great Taste of America. It sells “god awful stuff”—cereal full of additives and loads of sugar, horrible stuff. But it’s really popular because Americans are nostalgic for the taste of youth.

“But what they don’t understand is it’s just filth. It’s horrible stuff. Meat in America is actually illegal in Europe because of the additives and steroids. And you have people say, ‘I really miss American meat.’ It just makes people laugh. Like, what do you miss? The poison? You’ve got great butchers here who are not poisoning their meat. Why would you miss something that’s so bad for you?”

He met one person the other day who was under the impression that Europe was a country.

“You can imagine, she got shot down. People said, ‘Maybe you need to go back to kindergarten and look at a map.’”

“Only 40% of US citizens have a passport,” he points out. “That tells you everything you need to know.”

Roamer 12 is incredibly close to his doctor and nurses. They email him pretty much every day asking how he’s doing. They used to write little letters and notes for him. He kept them and framed them as memories of his time in the hospital.

One nurse wrote a four-page letter about why she became a nurse and why she loves being a nurse. She said:

“And then he arrived in our ward to give us a lesson in life, courage, and bravery, and we thank him. He’s a darling. And I haven’t mentioned it, but he’s also a journalist and a writer, and he writes beautiful articles that he shares with us, and he has really given us meaning again on the ward, sense of purpose, thanks to him.”

Another nurse did a lovely little thing with hearts on it saying “My favorite patient from his favorite nurse. I am your favorite nurse.”

“They’re great people,” he says.

Was there a hardest part about moving abroad?

“No,” he says. “My journey to Spain was pensati fet. Thought and did. I thought I’d do it and I just did it.”

His daughter’s reaction—or lack thereof—summed it up perfectly. It’s just him. He drives lorries to India. He goes to Cuba. He moves to Spain. That’s just who he is.

Is there anything he would do differently?

“I probably would have gone through the trouble of getting my Irish passport before I came. I came here on a British passport knowing it was not the best passport because of Brexit. I was kind of lazy. I thought, well, I’ve got the British passport, and it will get me in for now, and I’ll worry about it later. And guess what? Later has arrived.”

But aside from the bureaucracy? No. He thinks he’ll stay in Spain now. His next ambition is to get Spanish citizenship, but he needs to get the Irish thing sorted first. Which means emailing the Vatican for a 60-year-old marriage certificate.

How did he figure out all the steps for passports and citizenship?

Facebook groups, mostly. But also, there’s a whole class of people in Spain called “gestores”—fixers. They help you get the things you need and charge you, but not huge amounts.

“It’s kind of accepted,” he explains. “The government doesn’t really have any interest in changing the system because that sector employs a lot of people who are paying taxes. If they made it easier—said people could just do it on a website—they’d have loads of unemployment. So they kind of have a self-interest in having these crazy bureaucratic systems that only gestores can navigate.”

You can hire a gestor and they help you navigate the system. They help bump things up at the government, help get your stuff to the front of the line.

“It’s very hard to get an appointment to go in and get your visa. But lo and behold, you pay a gestor 200 bucks and they’ve miraculously got you an appointment next week. They told me there are no appointments till April.”

One gestor who Roamer 12 was friendly with explained:

“What we do is we have friends who work at the office and we reserve a lot of slots for our clients. So they’ll say slots aren’t available, but we’ve actually got them. We can dish them out.”

It’s completely legal. Not even shady. Just a part of life in Spain.

There have three levels. The cheapest one, you just pay them and they’ll give you an appointment. The most expensive is €200, and for that they’ll get you the appointment, make sure you have all the documents you need, and come with you to the appointment. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, they’ll hold your hand through the whole process.

“It’s kind of money well spent. But you shouldn’t have to spend money on such a basic principle of citizenship.”

That’s an argument he’s never going to win in Spain.

Roamer 12 tells me it’s incredible how they looked after him in Spain.

His surgeon said, “You’re not a foreigner. You speak Spanish. You’re one of us. You’re very well assimilated. You’re as much one of us as anyone here.”

They make him feel very welcome.

Six years after a near-death experience, losing his brother, waking up and deciding life was too short to care about jobs that don’t matter and commutes that drain you—Roamer 12 is alive.

More than alive. He’s living. In Valencia. With a team of nurses who write him four-page letters about courage and bravery. With a surgeon who tells him he’s one of them. With a new kidney from Spain’s world-leading transplant system. With healthcare that’s free and doctors who hold your hand and tell you everything’s going to be okay.

Pensati fet.

He thought he’d move to Spain and he just did it.

Now he’s home.

He was eight years old. His mother had just moved him from Trinidad to New York—alone, on a plane, JFK pickup style. One day she took him to the ocean and the next thing he knew, he was in the water.

Sink or swim. Fight or flight.

He swam.

Twenty-four years later, he’d apply that same philosophy to leaving the US entirely. Except this time, he was the one doing the throwing.

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He lived in the US for 24 years. Houston, specifically. Long enough to get a degree in accounting (because he refused to let money—or someone else’s understanding of it—destroy what he built). Long enough to deal with depression and suicide attempts when he was younger. Long enough to find his own inner peace and realize that living in the US was “not palpable” for him at all.

“I felt this pull,” he tells me. “Spiritually.”

He’d established his business by then—Mind, Body, and Soul Enlightenment Entertainment. An umbrella that fit all his passions: DJing, guided meditation, Reiki healing, hot yoga, trip sitting and public speaking. He could have bought or rented a building or something.

But he asked himself: do I want a physical address, or do I want to be mobile?

“I’d rather be mobile. That way there’s a deeper, better connection with each of my clients.”

So he started traveling. Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Jamaica. He couldn’t decide which country to move to at first—Mexico, Tobago, Nigeria, Portugal—until one day something just said, “Go to Mexico.”

He went to Oaxaca first, got a taste, and then he just kept going.

His business has been running for two years now. It’s successful, but not in the way you’d measure success if you were a venture capitalist or an Instagram influencer chasing millions of followers.

“I would like more clients,” he admits, “but I realized my business is not going to be connecting with millions. It’s going to be thousands. Because I’m not going to do anything that’s inauthentic.”

He watches content creators grind out daily posts, chasing algorithms, optimizing engagement. And he’s just like, nah.

“I don’t need that stress. I don’t need that pressure. When I put out content, it’s meaningful. It’s intentional.”

The business isn’t about getting your money. It’s about healing the mind, body, and soul, and you can’t do that if the incentives are misaligned and all you want to do is collect cash.

“I could be charging a whole lot more,” he says, “but I charge according to the country I’m in and according to my clients. Some clients can’t pay right away. I do require a deposit, but we can work out a payment plan. There are ways to do business that’s not just harsh and focusing on treating people as dollar signs.”

Every person has their own story, their own feelings, their own perspective. He treats each person individually. Even in a group setting, he spends time with each person to connect.

“That’s what we’re missing in life. We’re not connecting as deep as we should be.”

It’s funny, he says, how social media made the world smaller but somehow emptier of anything real.

“Even the way people talk about connection is so different than what it was supposed to mean. What it used to mean…”

For him, real connection isn’t about follower counts or engagement rates. It’s about the people he met in Colombia who cooked him meals without expectations. Who loved him without assumptions.

“When somebody makes a choice to love you and show you love without having expectations or assumptions, that’s true connection.”

And that’s what keeps him moving. It’s not because he’s running from anything, but because he’s searching for that—people who choose to show up, who choose to connect, who choose to love without the transactional bullshit that social media turned human interaction into.

He’s firm on this: if he ever had to hire someone for his business, the greatest qualification wouldn’t be what they learned in a book or what they achieved in their profession.

“It’s really about immersing yourself in different cultures. When you have that experience, you know how to treat people from different cultures differently. You have a certain level of empathy. And that’s what’s missing in the majority of society now. We don’t have empathy for others. We want to generalize. And generalizing is really laziness.”

The people he’s met while traveling—in Colombia, in Mexico, in Panama—they’ve shared time with him. They’ve talked to him, made him meals, welcomed him without the defensive walls that people in the US have all around them.

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It seems counterintuitive. An accounting degree for a business centered on meditation, Reiki, and spiritual healing. But for Roamer 11, it makes perfect sense.

“I decided to get my accounting degree because I don’t want something like money to come and destroy what I’ve built.”

He knows that money is the root of a lot of problems in the world. So he learned how it works, how to manage it, and how to make sure it doesn’t become the thing that controls him or his business.

“The people I end up hiring, there has to be a connection, an understanding that this is first food for the soul. And then the other things like traveling first class, having drivers pick you up at the airport, all the luxury—that comes with you just being your authentic self.”

He’s seen influencers all over the world getting paid for personality. That’s what people pay for, and he knows he has a pretty amazing personality, so he’s not worried about that.

But he’s also not chasing it. He’s letting it come to him on his terms.

The hardest part of moving wasn’t the visa process, though Mexico’s was “a little interesting.” It wasn’t even the language barrier—he did his temporary residency interview in Spanish without taking a single class or reading a single book. Just by straight conversations.

The hardest part was adapting quickly.

“When you’re traveling, it’s not like you can take a step back and ease into it. You have to jump in head first.”

Sink or swim.

It’s the same lesson from the ocean when he was eight. You don’t get to wade in slowly. You get thrown in, and you figure it out or you don’t.

“The culture and the language, that comes with the territory. When you consciously make the choice to visit a country, you have to understand there’s a different language, different culture. You have to throw away all your misconceptions and experiences—what you’ve heard from others and you have to experience it yourself. Because your experiences will be different than other people’s.”

Coming from Trinidad—a fourth-world country with small towns, dirt roads, not a lot of big cities, and then going to major urban centers across Latin America required “reprogramming the mind.”

“That’s the hardest thing. Wherever we’re brought up, we have that mentality and those people around us. Once you travel, it’s really a shock to the system if you’re not careful.”

That’s why he meditates as much as he does. To keep things aligned internally so it’s easier to adapt externally.

“It’s hard when you’re not only having to fight this other culture, but you’re having to fight yourself internally too.”

His number one piece of advice for travelers is to follow your intuition.

“A lot of adults overthink. When you’re a kid, you just flow. So when it comes to traveling, always trust your intuition. Don’t do it because this person said this or you saw photos. Trust what your intuition is telling you. Because your intuition is not going wrong.”

He did all the groundwork himself with no hired help or professional consultants. All he had was just Facebook groups, recommendations from people he met, and his own legwork. He did his own paperwork, conducted his interview in Spanish, and figured it all out.

“You can’t expect others to do the work for you. We all have our own mentality. We have our own perceptions.”

And because of that, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to moving abroad. Everybody’s coming from somewhere different. The orchestration of their journey has to happen uniquely.

I asked him if there was one thing that could have made his process easier, what would it have been?

“Honestly, there’s nothing. Because everything was meant to happen. There’s no regrets.”

He believes you have to experience something first to have an understanding of how to do things. Some of the negative experiences he’s had weren’t even about him—they were projections of other people’s insecurities.

“How people act, how people treat you, how people generalize you—that’s not on you. That’s a projection they have of their own insecurities. So it’s really just focusing on the things you can control.”

Yes, there are things he could have done differently. But he doesn’t regret any of it. Because if things had happened differently, he wouldn’t be the man he is today. He wouldn’t connect with the people he connects with today.

“The process has really helped build an appreciation for everywhere you are and for yourself.”

Roamer 11 isn’t settling anywhere permanently. At least no yet. Maybe not ever. He’s still traveling, still connecting, and building his business one authentic interaction at a time.

He’s not chasing millions of followers or venture capital or the kind of success that requires sacrificing your soul for a paycheck. He’s chasing real connections like where someone cooks you a meal without expecting anything in return.

He learned how to swim by being thrown in the ocean at eight years old. He learned how to live by throwing himself into countries where he didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the culture and didn’t have a plan beyond “follow your intuition.”

Now he’s teaching other people how to do the same—through meditation, through healing, through hot yoga and Reiki and DJ sets that remind people what it feels like to be present in your body instead of lost in your head.

Sink or swim. He chose to swim, and he’s still swimming, country by country, connection by connection, one authentic moment at a time.

That’s what moving abroad taught him. Home isn’t a place. It’s a feeling, and sometimes you have to travel halfway around the world to find people who know how to make you feel it.

She was born in Italy but left 40 years ago for good reason. She’d built a life in London—first in information technology for investment banks, then as a garden designer with a business so successful it stopped being enjoyable. She spoke English fluently, had friends, had roots, and she was ready to pull them all up.

“I just wanted to try a warmer country where life perhaps was a little bit easier and a slower pace,” she tells me. “So I chose Spain. I wasn’t sure I was going to remain in Spain, but it was certainly my stepping stone.”

That was 2019. Just before the world stopped.

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She arrived in Malaga with a plan that wasn’t really a plan. More of a vibe. Explore Spain, see if it fit. Maybe move to Italy eventually since she spoke Italian and had the passport to go anywhere in Europe.

Then COVID hit.

“I stayed,” she says simply. “And I decided to remain for the time being.”

It’s funny how that works. How a temporary escape becomes permanent not because you planned it that way, but because the universe shut down all your other options and you realized you were actually okay with where you landed.

Five years later, she’s still in Malaga and she’s also still not sure if it’s her forever home. She still has reservations about moving to Italy because of the politics and because, honestly, she prefers Spanish people to Italians even though she’s Italian herself.

There’s something deeply relatable about that. The way we can love where we’re from and still not want to go back. The way home becomes a complicated concept when you’ve lived long enough to know that geography doesn’t define belonging.

Before Spain, Roamer 10 had already reinvented herself once. She’d spent years in information technology, working for investment banks in London—the kind of job that pays well but slowly drains you until you realize you’re living for weekends and dreading Mondays.

So she left. Retrained as a garden designer, followed her passion and built a business that was actually successful.

Too successful, it turned out. “My business was very successful, but I just ended up working too much because it was so big. It stopped being something that I enjoyed.”

Success is a strange trap. You work to build something you love, and then the thing you built becomes the thing that imprisons you. More clients, more projects, more running around London trying to keep up with demand. The dream becomes a job, and the job becomes the thing you need to escape from.

So she asked herself: what job would let her work from anywhere in the world?

The answer was teaching English.

She already spoke the language fluently. She could retrain. And most importantly, she could do it remotely—85% of her work now happens online. She can work from anywhere in Europe with an internet connection.

“I achieved really what I wanted to do,” she says, “which was to be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world.”

It’s not the garden design dream she started with. But it’s the freedom dream she needed.

The hardest part wasn’t leaving London. It wasn’t giving up her business or saying goodbye to friends. It was landing in Andalucía and realizing she couldn’t understand anyone.

“I thought I spoke a little Spanish,” she admits. “But the problem is, people in Andalucía speak a very different type of Spanish. I couldn’t understand.”

And when you can’t understand, you can’t integrate. You end up hanging out with other expats—which is fine, except it’s not why you moved. You didn’t leave one English-speaking city to recreate it in a warmer location.

“For me, living in a country, I want to be part of the culture. I want to integrate.”

So she did the work. She improved her language skills. She volunteered at a dog shelter because she loves dogs and because it put her around Spanish people. She took dance classes. Swing and Lindy Hop, specifically, which meant learning not just the language but the rhythm of how people in Andalucía move through the world.

She stopped going to language exchange events because everyone just wanted to practice their English. Instead, she built her social circle around hobbies where Spanish was the default.

Five years in, she’s integrated. Not perfectly (is anyone ever perfectly integrated anywhere?) but enough. Enough to feel like she belongs. Enough to prefer Spanish people to the Italians she technically is. Enough to stay.

“Before moving, I should have taken Spanish classes,” she says. “I should have raised my level higher than it was when I came here.”

She knows British people who’ve lived in Spain for years and still don’t speak Spanish. They never integrate. They recreate England in Spain and then complain that Spain isn’t England.

“Definitely, the number one thing is learning the local language. You really need to relax and adjust to the way things are in a different country.”

Her advice for anyone considering a move: visit first. Rent for a month or two. See if you actually like it before committing.

And then—this is the part that matters—be flexible.

“You can have a plan, you can have a strategy, but your strategy and plan have to have some flexibility. If you’re too rigid, you suffer. Things happen. Like COVID, for example. I wasn’t planning to stay here, but COVID came, so I had to readjust.”

The ability to pivot isn’t just a business skill. It’s a life skill. Especially when you’re building a life across borders.

“One thing I think is important is not to be afraid,” she tells me. “Moving to another country can be scary. Fear can be paralyzing. But you need to overcome that fear because then you realize there was really nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a mental block.”

She applies this philosophy to all areas of her life, not just moving abroad. But it’s particularly true when you’re standing at the edge of a decision that could change everything.

“Sometimes it’s scarier to stay in a place where you’re not happy than to actually make a change and try something new.”

That’s the thing nobody tells you about staying put. We think of it as the safe option, the default, the path of least resistance. But staying in a place that drains you—whether it’s a city or a job or a relationship—isn’t safe. It’s just slow erosion. It’s choosing to be uncomfortable in a familiar way instead of uncomfortable in a way that might lead somewhere better.

Roamer 10 chose uncomfortable in a new way. She chose not understanding the language and rebuilding her social circle and figuring out Andalusian Spanish and whether Malaga would be home.

And five years later, she’s still there. Still not sure if it’s forever. Still open to the possibility of somewhere else. But also? Still there.

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It’s worth pointing out what makes Roamer 10 story possible: an Italian passport.

She doesn’t need a visa for Spain. She can work anywhere in Europe. She has options that most people don’t have, and she knows it.

“I was fortunate enough to have a European passport, so I could really move anywhere in Europe,” she says.

That passport is the difference between “I’m ready for a change” being a daydream and being a Tuesday afternoon in Malaga. It’s the difference between flexibility and bureaucracy. Between exploring and being stuck.

Not everyone has that privilege. And for those who don’t, the process is exponentially harder.

But even with the passport, even with the flexibility, even with the language skills and the remote work setup—it still took courage. It still took leaving behind 35 years of life in London. It still took showing up in a new country and doing the uncomfortable work of integration.

The passport opened the door. She’s the one who walked through it.

If you’re thinking about moving abroad, Roamer 10’s advice is simple:

Learn the language before you go because language is the bridge to integration, and integration is the bridge to actually living somewhere instead of just existing there.

Visit before you commit. Spend a month. See if you like it. See if you can see yourself there not just on vacation but on a random Tuesday when nothing interesting is happening.

Be flexible. Have a plan, but hold it loosely.

And most importantly: don’t let fear keep you in a place where you’re unhappy.

“There’s really nothing to be afraid of,” she says. “Sometimes it’s scarier to stay than to leave.”

Roamer 10 isn’t sure if Malaga is her forever home. She might move to Italy. She might go somewhere else entirely. She might stay exactly where she is for another five years and then wake up one day and realize she’s put down roots without meaning to.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? You don’t have to know forever. You just have to know what’s next.

For her, next was Spain. Next was leaving the rat race and the gray skies and the politics that made her tired. Next was volunteering at a dog shelter and learning Lindy Hop and teaching English to people in time zones she’ll never visit.

Next was choosing flexibility over certainty. Choosing to try over choosing to stay put.

And five years later, she’s still choosing. Still flexible. Still open to what comes next.

I think that’s what moving abroad teaches you: home isn’t a place you find. It’s a choice you make, over and over, until one day you realize you’ve been home all along.

Even if you’re not sure you’ll stay forever.

Even if you’re still learning the language.

Even if you left 40 years ago for good reason and came back anyway, just in a different country, with different weather, and a completely different life.

Sometimes the stepping stone becomes the destination, and sometimes that’s exactly what you needed all along.

She came with one medium-large suitcase, a carry-on, and a backpack. That’s it. Everything else — the 50+ pairs of heels, the life she’d built as a social worker, the family who didn’t understand why she’d leave — she left behind.

“I told my students, don’t ever run from me, because I’ll catch you,” she laughs. “And they’d be like, ‘Mamas, you’re in your stilettos.’ And I was like, ‘And I’ll catch you. How embarrassed are you going to be when Miss catches you in her stilettos?’”

That was Roamer 9 from Texas. The one who worked 80 to 120 hours a week trying to reunify migrant children with their families. The one who knew what it meant to be the first in your family to go to university. The one who wore armor in the form of perfectly painted nails and never-a-hair-out-of-place professionalism because she had to.

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Roamer 9 is what you’d call bicultural, though even that word feels too neat for the messy reality of it. Her dad immigrated from Mexico as a kid, alone. Her mom’s family never immigrated at all. They were already in Texas when Texas was still Mexico. The border crossed them, not the other way around.

“Genetically, I’m 100% Mexican,” she explains. “But on my mom’s side, they’ve been in the US for generations. They’re the ones who’ll tell you they’re American, not Mexican. And I just… I can’t relate to that. I grew up in a Mexican household. We listened to Los Tigres del Norte and Tupac and Bon Jovi. My dad made sure we spent every summer in Monterrey so we’d never forget where we came from.”

Her parents did something radical: her mom got her GED at 43, after Roamer 9 had already graduated from university. The whole family became the first to finish high school. Roamer 9 became the first to go to college.

That kind of shift changes everything. It opens doors but it also creates distance.

Roamer 9 thought she’d go into politics. She studied political science and was ready for law school. Then her mentor sat her down and explained what that life would actually look like — the compromises, the performative marriages for optics, the way she’d have to hide pieces of herself to be palatable.

“I was like, I don’t want an arranged marriage for politics,” she says. “So I went into education instead.”

Not as a teacher but as a social worker and life coach for at-risk students — gang members, kids struggling with addiction, the ones the system had already written off. She wanted to be proof that you could come from the ghetto and make it out. Not in the “leave and never look back” way, but in the “my parents still live in the house I grew up in and that will always be home” way.

Then one of her students died from an overdose.

“That really broke me,” she says quietly. “There was this piece of me that was like, I couldn’t save them. And I know it wasn’t my job to save them, but… that’s why I got into this. I wanted to see people know they have the opportunity to make something of themselves.”

Shortly after, she moved to Michigan. Worst decision of her life.

At 26, Roamer 9 got her first real taste of racism.

She was invited as an expert to speak about child labor laws. She was a professional with a degree and years of experience. And still, people asked her why her English was so good. Told her she needed to “learn her place.”

“I was like, I’m from Texas. It’s my first language,” she remembers. “And they’d say, ‘Your English isn’t that good.’ It was just… it was racist and sexist. And these were professionals.”

Her parents had shielded her from this growing up. They lived through the race wars of the ‘90s, sent her to a school that was chaos incarnate, but somehow kept her from understanding just how ugly the world could be. Michigan ripped that veil away.

“I had this conversation with my dad,” she says. “I told him, ‘I don’t want to hate all white people because of my interactions with this group of white people. That makes me just as bad. It makes me them. And I can’t let them win like that.’”

So she moved back to Texas.

In 2014, she took a job in San Antonio working on the border crisis. Thousands of unaccompanied children were crossing into the US every day, and the government scrambled to hire social workers to help reunify them with family members or process returns.

Roamer 9 loved the work. She put in 80 to 120 hours a week. She didn’t see her family for a year, even though they lived just four hours away. Her siblings literally drove to San Antonio one day just to have lunch with her because she was working too much to visit.

“I wish someone would have been there for my dad when his immigration thing was going on,” she explains. “My dad’s backstory is the story of a lot of these kids — human trafficking, abuse, slipping through the cracks. So I was really dedicated to it.”

But the system wasn’t set up for dedication. It was set up for optics and politics and bureaucracy. The people on the ground cared. The machine above them didn’t.

She had a “come to Jesus” moment. What was she doing? Why was she sacrificing her health, her family, her life for a system that wasn’t built to help the people she cared about?

Then she went to Croatia for a dance festival.

Dance has always been therapy for Roamer 9. She’s a salsa dancer, and when a friend told her the biggest salsa festival in the world was in Croatia, she organized a group trip.

For two weeks, Rovinj became a dance paradise. People dancing in the streets, on the beach, everywhere. And she met Latinos from all over Europe — Sweden, Norway, Spain, France.

“The immigration pattern was supposed to be to the States,” she says. “And here were all these people who’d gone to Europe instead. And education was free. I was like, why did I pay $100k for university? I could have done this for free.”

On the plane ride home, sitting next to her friend, she said it out loud: “I don’t want to go back.”

Her friend laughed it off. “Yeah, but we have to.”

“Do we?” She asked.

And just like that, the decision was made. She didn’t belong in the US. Well, she didn’t know where she belonged yet, but she knew it wasn’t there.

She eventually chose Spain because she spoke Spanish and because she could come on a language assistant visa. She did her research — three years on that visa, then she could modify it to true residency if she found someone to sponsor her.

What she didn’t plan for was a pandemic.

She submitted her residency modification the Tuesday before the world shut down. Wednesday morning, Spain went into lockdown and then her back gave out.

She’d had a herniated disc from a car accident years earlier. In the US, doctors had given her 180 Percocets and told her to deal with it. She refused surgery at 27 because she didn’t want to be on an operating table every five years for the rest of her life, or worse, end up paralyzed. So she got fit. She worked out religiously. The doctor told her if she stopped, it would be ten times worse.

Then came COVID. Gyms closed. She couldn’t work out. The disc wrapped around her spinal column and pinched the nerves. She lost control of the left side of her body.

Her friend, who’d moved in with her during lockdown, lived through the agony of her friend crying herself to sleep from the pain.

“You have two choices,” her friend said. “I call an ambulance, or we call a cab and go to the hospital.”

They took a cab because Roamer 9 still carried the trauma of the medical systems in the US. She feared the bill that would be coming with an ambulance ride that a short cab could mitigate. But when she got to the hospital, the doctor was amazing.

He told her she needed surgery, but it was COVID, so they’d have to figure it out.

She began to panic. She was raised in a country where surgery meant financial ruin. She had already turned down surgery once in the US. And now not only was she being told it was her only option, but her family wasn’t around to be there for her. The doctor recognizing her fears put their hands on her shoulders and reassured her.

“You’re not in the US. You will be okay. You will walk again. We will take care of you.”

He put her in the hospital to wait — a controlled environment in case she fell or something went wrong.

“This would never happen in the States,” she says. “Like, never.”

In the States, they’d send you home to wait for surgery, with a handful of pills to numb the pain while you waited. No regard for what could have happened, all to make space and turn over beds as quickly as possible. Because someone laying in bed waiting doesn’t create high profit opportunity.

In total, she had two major back surgeries. She has a titanium back now. She paid for taxis, medicine, and a €500 corset. That’s it.

The day she went into surgery, she found out she’d been approved for residency.

“I remember thinking, okay, I’m gonna be able to walk again, and now Spain can’t get rid of me,” she laughs.

Finding housing was the hardest part. Madrid has a housing crisis, and she was competing with college students, language assistants, and international workers all arriving in August. On top of that, she had to get used to living in 25 square meters.

“A small apartment in Texas is a mansion,” she jokes. “Here, my apartment fits me and my dog. That’s it. My friends miss my brunches, but sorry, there’s no room.”

Most rentals in Spain come furnished — usually with grandma’s furniture. You inherit whatever was left behind. Nothing moves from its place in her apartment. It’s like Tetris. If something new comes in, something has to go out.

She vacuum-seals her winter clothes and stores them under the couch. Her heels live in IKEA bags under the sofa.

“The other day I was like, ‘Man, I gotta change my wardrobe out,’ and then I was like, ‘Oh, I really have become Spanish,’” she laughs. “In the States, you have a walk-in closet. Everything’s there year-round. Here, every space has a purpose.”

But the hardest part wasn’t the logistics. It was the emotional adjustment. The grief.

“Even if you’re moving because you feel like you belong somewhere else, there’s still this grief process,” she explains. “You’re leaving your family, your friends, your culture. And technology is great, but time zones are time zones.”

She’s lost people while living abroad — her uncle, a cousin who died unexpectedly. She didn’t get to say goodbye.

“I knew it was going to happen. I knew I’d lose people. But knowing it and living through it are different things.”

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Spanish people are hard to befriend, Roamer 9 says this without judgment though. She says it’s just how it is. Kids go to school together from age three until university. Same 25 classmates for 15 years. When they finish school and come back to their city, they stick with those same people, even if they don’t really like them.

“It’s weird that your friends are your same friends from when you’re three,” she says. “Like, you can’t tell me you and Pepito actually like the same things and really get along. You’re friends because you’ve known each other since you were in diapers.”

So her community became other immigrants. People from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola. Dancers. Expats. The LGBTQ+ community.

“I think because they go through their own struggles, they understand what it feels like to be the outsider,” she explains. “There’s this empathy that comes from that. You have immigrant populations that really meld together with the LGBTQ+ community from this place of looking for belonging.”

These were the people who helped her through her surgeries. Her chosen family.

Ten years in Spain, and Roamer 9 still hasn’t spent a tenth of what her uncles spent on their US immigration journey 30 years ago.

She makes less money than she did in the States. But she’s comfortable. She has healthcare. She has access to education — Santander Bank gave her a year of Coursera for free just for being a customer. She can take classes on AI, marketing, whatever she wants.

“Spain recognizes that without immigrants, in 20 years, it’s going to collapse,” she says. “So they invest in people. Education and healthcare are priorities.”

Meanwhile, she watches what’s happening back home and feels vindicated in her decision to leave.

Her cousins on her mom’s side — the ones who’ve never been to Mexico, who consider themselves “American, not Mexican” — some of them voted for Trump. She’s blocked most of them.

“I had serious conversations with family members who were like, ‘I’m anti-immigration,’” she says. “And I told them, if you’re anti-immigrant, you’re anti my father. That’s a very serious line, and you’re crossing a line that I’m not okay with. And they’d say, ‘No, no, it’s all other immigrants, not your uncle.’ But that’s not how that works. That’s the same rhetoric as ‘all Black people are bad except for the Smith family down the street.’ That rhetoric was not okay for me.”

When she went home last May for two and a half weeks, she couldn’t wait to leave.

“I just wanted to go for a walk, and they’d be like, ‘No, it’s not safe.’ I can walk my dog at 2 a.m. here if I want to. There’s no comparison.”

A month and a half ago, she got laid off. Her company was purchased, and she was the highest-paid, newest person on the team. It was cheaper to let her go.

She could’ve panicked. Instead, she launched a company.

It’s designed to help people navigate the emotional and cultural side of moving abroad. Not the legal stuff — there are plenty of companies doing that. But the stuff nobody talks about like the grief of leaving, the panic of landing in a new country and thinking, “Oh shit, what did I do?” The first time you have to go to the doctor and you realize how traumatized you are by the US healthcare system.

“As immigration becomes easier, and it is becoming easier, people need support through the human side of it,” she explains. “The conversation with your family. The decision about what to pack. The loneliness. The oh-my-god-I-love-everything followed by the oh-my-god-I’m-so-alone.”

What She’d Tell You If You’re Thinking About It

“Be real with yourself about why you’re moving,” Roamer 9 says. “Is it adventure? Is it professional? Is it identity? And are you really prepared?”

If you’re really close to your family and they’re not okay with your move, it’s going to be hard. If you don’t have family, your friends become your chosen family, and losing that closeness, even with FaceTime and WhatsApp — is a real loss.

“Technology is great, but time zones are time zones.”

You’ll go through waves. The honeymoon phase where everything is amazing. Then days 31-60 when you’re like, can I go to a bar by myself? Can I sit at a restaurant alone? Where do I find the products I love?

When Roamer 9 first moved to Madrid, she couldn’t find Mexican products anywhere. Making corn tortillas from scratch cost €15 for just the flour. She was like, maybe I don’t want tortillas that bad.

Now she has a place that makes them fresh. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she says.

Roamer 9 isn’t the girl in stilettos anymore, the one who could chase down high school kids in heels. She’s the woman with the titanium back who dances salsa in Madrid and builds businesses from scratch and knows what it means to bet on yourself when home stops feeling like home.

She’s the one who came with a suitcase and a backpack and figured out the rest as she went.

And when I asked her if she’d do it again, she didn’t hesitate.

“I don’t belong in the States,” she says. “I knew that ten years ago, and I know it even more now. I make less money, but I’m comfortable. I have access to healthcare, education, community. I have a life. That’s not something I ever had back home.”

For anyone thinking about making the leap — whether it’s to Spain or anywhere else — Roamer 9 story is proof that you don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to be honest about why you’re going, prepared for it to be hard, and willing to find your people when you get there.

The thing nobody tells you about moving abroad is that it is not really about running away. It’s about running toward the version of yourself that couldn’t breathe where you were.

And sometimes, that version of you is waiting on the other side of the world, in a 25-square-meter apartment, with a dog and a community of other people who get it.

Sometimes, that’s exactly where you’re supposed to be.

He couldn’t find opportunities in the US. Neither could he find community, funding for his nonprofit, or even get responses to job applications. So he saved money by working a seasonal job for three months. And with what he saved—an amount that technically puts him below the poverty line in New Jersey—he moved to Mexico City, and he’s been comfortable for nine months.

“If I’m able to make dollars in one way or another and spend in pesos, that’s great. I can show up to Mexico with what I make in three months, and I have enough to live comfortably for a year.”

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He got involved with nonprofits and humanitarian organizations as a teenager—youth outreach, homeless shelters, and church missions. Latin America attracted him specifically. He knew people from there, and he’d been practicing Spanish for years.

In 2023, he went to Colombia for three months, funded by donations. He absolutely loved it, but then everything fell apart. “I was kind of just ghosted and ditched by different organizations.”

It kept happening with religious organizations especially.

“I don’t go along with things that I would identify as toxic, abusive, manipulative behavior. I called out a lot of those things and I wrote a book recently about my experiences.”

He went through what he calls “religious deconstruction,” and when that happened, he lost a lot of community locally.

“I tried to get involved with different nonprofits here in the Jersey, in New York, and Philly areas. But nobody ever responds to applications.”

He has a degree, he has experience, and he speaks Spanish, but no one in the US would hire him.

He also never found opportunities for dating in Jersey. Probably connected to the other two things.

“I was in religious circles, so I never had a consistent, regular person job, which is often necessary for dating.”

So the push factors stacked up:

• No job opportunities related to what he wanted to do.

• Lost community after religious deconstruction.

• No dating prospects.

• No funding for his nonprofit.

“I was like, okay, I don’t really have opportunities here.”

So worked to save enough to live in Mexico during most of 2024. And in December, he showed up to Mexico City with a backpack and a bank account.

He worked at a hostel and made connections with locals and internationals. Then he found a place for $200 a month in cash.

“I’m a minimalist. I have enough to live comfortably for a year on what I made in three months. I’m technically living below the poverty line in terms of New Jersey. But I can show up to Mexico with that and it’s like, oh, okay, I have enough.”

He also always wanted to be in Latin America. “Really friendly, really kind people in Mexico. Generally pretty welcoming. Beautiful country and nice weather.”

The cost of living is significantly lower, but the biggest pull is the community. “I’m able to access more community there in Mexico City. I don’t feel like I have that in the US.”

And then he met his girlfriend. She’s from Mexico City. “She’s been awesome.”

So now he has:

• A place to live for $200/month

• A community he didn’t have in Jersey

• A girlfriend he loves

• Enough money saved to be comfortable for a year

Roamer 8 said that one thing that makes Mexico easier than other countries is proximity.

“It’s close to the US geographically, but also culturally. If I showed up somewhere more culturally different—like Sub-Saharan Africa, much of India—that would be a lot more difficult.”

Mexico and the US are economically connected. So many people live on both sides of the border. “This is not a huge jump like it would be for some other places.”

And because he has a US passport, the visa process is simple. “I can show up with a US passport, a backpack, a bank account and I can be there for six months.”

When his six months were up, he went to Guatemala for a week. Then re-entered Mexico.

Right now, he’s there as a tourist. But he’s trying to get legal residency.

The options are: job, university, or marriage.

“Usually the easiest is marriage, if you don’t have a job or university or enough income.”

To get residency without marriage, he’d have to show $50,000 annual income, but he doesn’t have that. “Perhaps we’ll get married. People do that—both legitimate marriages and fake marriages. Some people get married on Friday, get divorced on Monday to a local.”

He plans to do it legitimately though. “I hope I can get legal residency this upcoming year. Mexico doesn’t allow you to just keep coming in as a tourist most of the year. They’re pretty lenient with US citizens, but still.”

He’s not too worried about the paperwork. “Mexico loves paperwork. But it seems relatively easy if I have a little time and a guide from people who’ve already done it.”

There’s one challenge he didn’t expect: xenophobia.

“In general, people are very kind and welcoming. But there are a lot of people in Mexico City that have extreme hate and xenophobia. The ‘go back to your country’ sort of attitude.

He sees it in the US too—Americans saying the same thing to Mexicans.

But in Mexico City, the divide is generational. “The older generations are very welcoming. ‘Oh, that’s so great you’re here! Welcome! You’re basically Mexican now!’”

But Gen Z? “They’re pissed off at people that come from the US with dollars. We’re able to access a better life than they can, even if we’re working the same job. We’re making multiple times the amount.”

On July 4th, the American Independence Day, there were anti-American protests in Mexico City. The signs read things like “Fuck gringos. Go back to your country. We don’t want you here.”

There’s vandalism around the city too. “The Americans are the enemy. Lynch Americans. Make soup with their corpses,” with the graffiti written in English and Spanish.

He gets it, to an extent. “It’s largely a reaction to the bigger picture of colonialism and systemic issues. But also primarily right now because of the current US government.”

Still, in day-to-day life, no one’s ever treated him poorly. “Often, they think I’m French for some reason.”

“If I showed up with zero Spanish, that would be difficult. You can access things because there are tourists. There are people who speak English. But in terms of getting along with locals, Spanish is important.”

He learned a lot being there and broadened his vocabulary. But there’s another thing that made Mexico easier—familiarity.

“I’ve lived and had friendships and neighbors with Mexican folks all my life.”

So even though he’s in a different country, it doesn’t feel completely foreign.

“I feel like I have a general familiarity with this.”

Though he notes: Mexicans in the US are culturally different than those in Mexico City.

“Mexico City folks are more educated, and more progressive politically.”

He’s staying in an area that feels like Brooklyn in New York City. “I can walk everywhere. I felt safe everywhere I went in Mexico.”

Part of that is privilege. “I was probably in bubbles that were more touristy, even though I went to areas that weren’t. But also because of privilege—being a six-foot-one, straight, white American man. That helps.”

Still, the US pushes narratives about Mexico that don’t match reality. “The US puts out a lot of ignorant shit about a lot of countries. For people who don’t ever leave, it’s easy to believe. But people who leave are like, ‘I’m never going back.’”

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Right now, he plans to stay in Mexico long-term.

“I have a great community and a girlfriend. I intend to be in Mexico long term should things work out.”

But if the visa process were easier, would he consider another country?

“Yeah, I absolutely would. I could name a couple dozen countries I’d be happy to go to.”

He went to Mexico largely because of proximity—culturally, economically, geographically. And because entry was easy.

“I don’t feel like I have enough money to go to a lot of places, and the entry process was easier here.”

He mentioned that his great-grandparents came from Italy.

“The population of Italy is declining. But the Italian government is raising the barrier to entry for people from the Italian diaspora. If they wanted responsible working adults who aren’t criminals to enter, I would go.”

Japan came up too.

“I’m aware of demographic changes happening in a lot of countries. If they needed people like me, I’d consider it.”

What strikes me most about this interview is how straightforward it is.

He couldn’t find work in Jersey that aligned with what he wanted to do, he lost community after leaving evangelical spaces, and he couldn’t afford to live comfortably in the US.

So he saved money for three months and moved to a place where that money could last a year.

He’s not wealthy. He’s below the poverty line by US standards. But in Mexico City, he’s comfortable. He has a $200/month apartment, a girlfriend he loves, community he didn’t have in Jersey, and enough savings to not worry.

All because the exchange rate works in his favor.

He’s also the first Roamer to explicitly name his privilege: “I’m a six-foot-one, straight, white American man. That helps.”

Roamer 1 through 7 all faced different barriers. Visas, money, scams, bureaucracy, fixers charging 10x, and separation from children.

Roamer 8’s biggest barrier is the Anti-American graffiti that he sees but doesn’t experience personally.

That’s the difference a US passport makes when you’re moving to Mexico. No visa applications, no waiting, no proving you have $50,000 in an account. Just: show up, stay six months, leave for a week, come back.

Easy.

Some people fight bureaucracy at every step. (Roamers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7)

Some people move freely because they have EU passports. (Roamer 5)

And some people move freely because they have US passports going to certain countries. (Roamer 8)

The system isn’t neutral. It’s built to benefit certain people and block others.

Roamer 8 didn’t need fixers or lawyers. He didn’t need to prove he had $50,000 in the bank or marry someone for papers.

He just needed a US passport and a backpack.

And because he has those things, Mexico is accessible in a way it wouldn’t be for someone from the Philippines (Roamer 7) or Russia (Roamer 2 and Roamer 6) or Kazakhstan (Roamer 3).

The question isn’t just “how do we make moving easier?”

The question is: “why is it already easy for some people and impossible for others?”

Next week: Roamer 9.

Roamer 7 has lived in six countries. Germany, France, London, the US, the Philippines, Spain. She’s 28 years old and she’s exhausted.

“The visa processes have taken away like five years of my life. If I’m going gray for any reason, it’s going to be the visa process.”

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It started with Washington DC, in the US.

She’s from the Philippines. From a very small town—“middle of nowhere,” she said. Her university had a partnership with a school in DC. She got an internship in the US Congress.

The visa process was long, tedious, and scary.

“If you’re on a student visa, you have to prove you could pay for your whole stay. That means you have to have like $50,000 in your account. At least.”

She had to find housing, prove she could afford everything, and get a sponsor. The sponsor helped with paperwork, but the interview was terrifying. “The rejection rate for the US visa is really high.”

She eventually got approved, moved to DC, and loved it. “Everyone is so smart and intimidating. I really liked the fast pace of life.”

Then she decided to extend her stay, and she hired a lawyer.

She couldn’t afford a lawyer in the US, so she hired one in Canada—someone licensed to practice in New York. It was $60 per hour initially. Then it went up to $120.

“Every time you have to call him, you have to pay and it wasn’t even him doing the work. It was an associate, and the associate made mistakes which I think I could have done better. So it kind of made me upset about that. I kind of regretted paying him.”

When COVID hit and she needed to extend her internship again, she did the paperwork herself. “I decided not to go the lawyer route anymore because it was a lot of money.” She learned paying someone doesn’t mean it gets done right. Sometimes it just means you’re paying to watch someone else make mistakes.

Then came Spain.

After DC, she wanted to teach, so she applied to be a language assistant in Spain.

The problem was getting an appointment at the Spanish embassy. “The Spanish embassy—they have slots available for the day, and then the rest? You have to wait.”

She’s from an archipelago in the Philippines. She had to fly an hour to Manila just to get to the embassy, and the embassy was only open from 11am to 2pm.

She tried for a year and couldn’t get an appointment or the visa in Spain. The next year, she tried again, and this time, she learned about fixers. “In Spain, they usually sell those appointments. You have to find a fixer to do it for you, but you have to pay 10 times the original cost.”

A clearance officially costs €4, but with a fixer, it’s €300. She had no choice. There were no appointments or other way through.

So she paid.

Because she’d lived in the US for more than six months, she needed an FBI clearance to prove she hadn’t committed any crimes.

So she had to get fingerprinted to move to DC. “The fingerprint process is very strict. You can’t do it yourself. You have to go somewhere.”

She’s from a very small town in the Philippines. When she went to the local police station at home, no one knew how to do the process. “No one knows that. So I had to travel to find someone to do it for me.”

And the FBI clearance took six months to arrive.

She got to Spain and started teaching. Everything was fine for a while until her visa ended, and Spain suddenly decided they were no longer accepting Filipino language assistants.

“We were scrambling. Every one of us. We had like 90 days to be legally here.”

They found a new sponsor, but the process to extend was complicated.

“If you want to get a cita from the extranjería—their government office—you have to wake up at six in the morning. And they release appointments every Monday.”

She described the difference between the US government, the Spanish government, and the Philippine government. “Spain and the Philippines have a lot of similarities. We’re both former colonies of Spain. So there’s a lot of cultural things. They’re actually very forgiving with the papers.”

Someone at the office might say: “Oh, this is incomplete? Don’t worry. Just look for me. I can handle that for you.”

“The padrino system is still there in Spain. If you know anyone, you can get away with it.”

But the US is anything but forgiving.

She finally got her visa sorted. But then she wanted to travel to Norway.

The paperwork Spain gave her didn’t allow her to travel inside the EU. Only outside the EU.

“It’s called the regreso. Interesting, right?”

She had to call the Norwegian embassy. They told her: “You cannot apply for a visa while you’re in the European Union. You have to go out.”

“This is bullshit,” she said.

But then someone from the Spanish government helped her process her card. Within a week, she had it.

She told me about her cousin—an au pair in Norway.

The au pair program paid 400 kr a month. Everything was free—housing, food. Also, her cousin made five grand doing side jobs like cleaning houses off the books.

Then Norway canceled the au pair program and her cousin had to leave. But instead of going home, she went to Portugal and lived there for five years. Now she’s applying for citizenship.

But she went back to Norway and started working under the table again.

“I asked, are you not scared? Because I’m really scared.”

Her cousin’s Portuguese card expired and last October, the EU implemented a new entry tracker system.

“She had to fly back to Portugal without papers or anything.”

They booked the first flight of the day—no luggage, because checking luggage might trigger an ID check. They chose the first flight because there’s less border control early in the morning.

She made it through and now she’s paying for a house in Norway while living in Portugal. She bought a fake contract for two grand so she could renew her visa.

“She’s lying to her lawyer. Her lawyer doesn’t know she was in Norway for the past four years. I told her that you should never lie to your lawyer. You have attorney-client privilege.”

But her cousin doesn’t listen.

“Sometimes I get angry at her because of her stupidity. You know, you could have gone back to Portugal and renewed it.”

I asked if she worries about her own visa.

“I worry about it all the time. It’s not just a visa. It’s your future that’s tied to it.”

She thought about staying in the Philippines. Maybe her career would have been okay. But in Spain, it’s a standstill.

“The job market is really bad. I couldn’t find something I wanted to do. So it takes up a lot of your mind. What’s going to happen next? I don’t want to go back to the Philippines.”

At one point, she thought about going back because she was losing hope.

“It really affected me. I feel like, okay, what am I going to do? That’s why I always have a job. So I could feel like I’m actually doing something in life. Because being a language assistant is not a career.”

She’s leaving Spain in a year and moving back to DC.

“I tried living in Spain, but I don’t think it’s for me. The lifestyle here is very slow and people are conformists. People just want their siesta, their sangria, and to dance. That’s it. That’s Spanish life. They don’t want to climb the corporate ladder. Life is just about living it. You don’t have to do anything.”

Her explanation of Spanish life is not a criticism, exactly. Just a mismatch. “Purpose isn’t tied to work here. It’s just about existing in what you’re given. Being present.”

She tried. She has a remote job with a US company, but she doesn’t see herself settling there. “I miss the fast pace. Everyone in DC is so smart, so intimidating. I liked that.”

She got engaged recently. Her fiancé is a DOD civilian and he’s getting assigned to Germany. So the plan is: move back to DC, then eventually Germany when he gets the posting.

She could apply for a fiancé visa right now, but she doesn’t want to. She’s heard stories on Reddit and TikTok, about the interrogation process for fiancé visas in the US.

“They used to let you go through them together in the same room. Now, you have to be in separate rooms and they’re much more aggressive. One wrong answer and you could lose everything. And it could go for hours.”

Before, it was 30 minutes with general questions. Now it’s three hours. “I’m a person of color. It’s kind of scary for me to go that route.”

So instead, they’re getting married in Europe first. Denmark, specifically. “It’s the easiest country. If you want to get married next week, you can. It’s like the Vegas of Europe and it’s recognized everywhere.”

In Spain, the bureaucracy is intense. But in Denmark, you just need a passport and a certificate of no marriage. That’s it.

They’ll get married there, then she’ll go to the US with a green card already in hand. “At least when I go there, I have a green card. Because if I go on a K-1 visa, you never know what’s going to happen at the airport. I think they’re just finding reasons to take everyone out of the US at this point. So, this is the safest way.”

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I asked what she would have done differently.

“I would have researched immigration lawyers more, so I wouldn’t have ended up with a bad one.”

But even then she wouldn’t hire from Spain. “All the information is online. But there are a few pieces of information that’s not openly public.”

Like the empadronamiento—registering your address. You need it to apply for your residency card. But some landlords won’t let you register because they’re renting under the table.

“So you have to pay someone to give you a contract. That’s another hurdle.”

Spain is complicated, and slow. Even the pace of life. “When you’re used to instant things, it’s very hard.”

She joined a Facebook group for Philippine auxiliaries in Spain. “They have all the experience, all the tips. They can give recommendations for translation, for accredited people.”

That’s where she found help like tips for the visa interview, which translators to use, and how to navigate the system.

But the person who helped her most was a teacher at the school where she first worked.

“Spanish people are very nice. The school I first worked at—I still have a good relationship with the teacher. She’s like my mother. Every summer I come to her beach house.”

I think having someone local is really important when you’re moving abroad. Someone who can help you. But at 28, she’s ready to settle down.

“Maybe when I was in my teens, moving a lot was exciting. But now I actually want to settle in a place. Have a career, buy a house, and just settle down.”

She’s tired of living out of one suitcase.

“You can’t buy beautiful plates or nice tablecloths because you’re only taking one suitcase. I want to build a life. Not just a career—but make a home. Something you can really feel comfortable in.”

She’s over the visa processes. “I think it has taken away like five years of my life.”

If she does another visa process, it’ll be for the US and then she’s done. “I don’t want to do it again, if I don’t have to.”

Despite everything—the fixers, the scams, the FBI clearances, the lawyers who made mistakes, the cousin stuck in limbo, the weight of visas hanging over everything—she doesn’t regret it.

“Moving around made me who I am. Piece by piece. What value should I take? What value should I not? What should I adapt?”

The US taught her about career ambition. Spain taught her about community, about relationships, about a sense of humanity she’d never experienced in the US.

Moving made her know herself more.

“What do I want in life? What’s important? Before, my plan was just: stay in the Philippines and work for the government. Now I have a different plan.”

Seven interviews in, and the fixer economy is finally clear.

It’s been there the whole time—Roamer 1’s realtor who became a guide, Roamer 2’s Telegram group, Roamer 3’s French friend who handled everything, Roamer 4’s regularization program. But Roamer 7 named it clearly: fixers. People who know someone. Sometimes professional, occasionally informal. Who can get you through when the system says there’s no way.

A €4 clearance becomes €300. An appointment that doesn’t exist suddenly frees up—if you pay.

The system creates scarcity—no appointments, impossible paperwork, six-month waits for documents and then people fill the gap. For a price.

And if you can’t pay? You wait. Or you give up. Or you end up like Roamer 7’s cousin, living in limbo with fake contracts and expired cards, one border crossing away from everything falling apart.

The question isn’t just “how do we make moving easier?”

The question is: “how do we dismantle the systems that create the need for fixers in the first place?”

Next week: Roamer 8.

“The hardest part was that I had to decide,” she said.

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“I always wanted to live outside of Russia. Like since I was a baby.”

When she was four or five years old, Mexican telenovelas were huge in Russia. She’d watch them with her grandmother.

“I literally said, ‘Okay, when I grow up, I will marry a Mexican and we’ll have a hacienda.’”

She laughed, her eyes pulled up in each corner. She looked genuinely happy. Almost at peace.

“Well, I’m about to marry a Mexican. No hacienda yet. But we do have time.”

Her mom worked for an American law firm in Moscow. The boss was American, living there with his family. She grew up with his kids, so English was always part of her life.

“At some point I fantasized about one of my mom’s American colleagues getting married to her and taking us to the US or something. That didn’t happen. She did remarry, but it was a Russian guy.”

She dreamed big about living somewhere else. About trying herself out outside of Russia.

Then she fell in love in Moscow, had a baby, and stayed, like so many people. But the dream never went away.

She speaks six languages because she once worked as a translator and interpreter. She had her own business—not a huge company, just her and a couple people she’d outsource to when things got busy.

She was making very good money before the Russian-Ukrainian war started. “I realized there would not be so many opportunities to make money. Not so many people want to work with Russia anymore.”

This is the second time I’ve heard this. Roamer 2 had shared the same concern of what being Russian meant for her in the job market.

Roamer 6’s business dried up and the work disappeared. “So I packed and came here to look for new opportunities.”

She wanted to move with her husband and their son. But her husband didn’t want to move, and he didn’t let their son go with her.

“So I moved on my own, and that was the hardest part.”

She’d been realizing for years that she and her husband weren’t good for each other anymore. But actually leaving—actually putting distance between herself and the situation—was still hard.

“At first it was hard. But then I realized it was actually a good thing. Seeing the big picture, zooming out a little, I realized that was the best decision I’d ever made.”

Her son is still in Russia. He hasn’t visited yet because he’s not 18—the legal age in Russia.

“I think his father is afraid he will want to stay.”

She’s always spoken Spanish to her son since he was born, even though Spanish isn’t technically her native language. “It’s the language of my heart.”

Her son is bilingual, and she thinks if he came to Mexico and liked it, he’d just say, “Hey, I’m staying with Mom. I’m going to school here tomorrow.”

So his father won’t let him visit. Not yet.

She didn’t plan extensively. “I moved in one day. I packed my stuff, and then the next day I was here.” She only took one suitcase, and one backpack, with the basics.

She knew it wasn’t cold in Cancun, so she didn’t need winter clothes. Though now, she says, she’s freezing in December.

“All my friends and family say, ‘Wait, are you sure you’re from Russia?’”

And then, she said, it was like a movie.

“Like the universe helping you with everything. It felt like destiny.”

She found money on the street within the first couple hours of arriving, found a job in a couple weeks, a place to rent, met her first best friend—a local woman at her first job, met her second best friend a year later playing volleyball on the beach, and met her fiancé around the same time.

“Everything just kind of fell into place naturally.”

It wasn’t all smooth, though. She dealt with con artists twice.

The first time, they made her papers. But it turned out the paperwork wasn’t 100% legal. She had to start from scratch. The second time, they said they could help her get political asylum. That didn’t work either.

Now she and her fiancé are waiting to get married so she can get her papers through him. “Right now, we’re saving money. The marriage for foreigners is more expensive than for Mexican citizens. We have to save about $400 just to get married. No rings, no dress, no big party. Just the documents which costs about 5,000 pesos.”

The con artists were recommended by people she knew. That’s what made it worse.

“When I first moved here, I got a job at a company—an office of an American company. This guy said, ‘Oh, I know this lady in Playa del Carmen. I think she can help you with your documents.’ I don’t think he even realized it was a scam until I mentioned it to other people and they said they didn’t use her because of visa difficulties.”

Her first employer paid for the initial paperwork. But because she went with the cheaper option, she ended up having to redo everything.

She didn’t have a detailed plan when she arrived.

“There’s a huge group of Russians in Mexico on Facebook. I joined that one.”

That’s where she found most of her jobs. That’s also where she looks for services—manicure, plumbers, whatever she needs. But she doesn’t have close friends from the Russian community in Cancun.

“Most Russian women who are here are mostly moms of babies. We don’t have the same schedule.”

She knows people, and goes to events sometimes, but it’s not a close friendship.

“My first best friend’s family literally adopted me. I’m with them for all the holidays, all the hurricanes, everything. Her grandmother screens all my boyfriends. She calls them and says, ‘You know what? If you ever hurt her, you will deal with me.’”

When I asked what advice she’d give to other people moving, she said: “Just be open to people. Be warm to them. Treat people the way you want to be treated.”

She said Mexicans are very open and warm. They will adopt you—if you let them.

Her friend’s family is proof. But that kind of belonging doesn’t come from Facebook groups or expat forums. It comes from showing up, being genuine, and letting people in.

I asked if she could go back in time, what would she do differently. She said she’d research immigration lawyers more carefully.

“I would have explained to my first employer that some lawyers charge double but they’re reliable. I don’t think he would have minded that or the cost. Instead of getting scammed twice.”

I asked if she’d ever think about leaving Cancun.

“With my fiancé, I could go anywhere. He’s my soulmate. If he says, ‘Let’s go anywhere,’ I’d go.”

She paused.

“Well, preferably not Russia. I don’t want to go back there. Fortunately, he doesn’t want to live there either.”

Maybe they’ll visit so he can meet her family. But just for two weeks. A month, tops, she explained.

She wouldn’t want to move somewhere colder. But if there were good opportunities, if they thought it was a good idea to start over somewhere else—maybe.

“Maybe in a few years when we have kids, we’d move to Mexico City. They say schools are better there. But it’s not a matter of tomorrow. Maybe like five to seven years at least.”

Mexico is her home base now.

“I’d like to travel. We both want to travel a lot. Right now we don’t have as much of a budget. But in the perfect world, we’d travel the world and see stuff.”

I keep trying to figure out what made roamer 6 experience feel so different.

Is it personality? Is she just more optimistic? More adaptable?

Is it timing? Did she happen to land in Cancun at exactly the right moment?

Is it the Mexican culture? The warmth she described—the way people adopted her immediately?

Or is it something else?

Maybe she always knew she was leaving. It wasn’t a question of if. It was just a question of when.

She’d been dreaming about it since she was four years old watching telenovelas with her grandmother.

She’d been preparing for it her whole life without realizing she was preparing.

So when the war gave her the final push, she didn’t have to wrestle with the decision. She just had to go. Maybe when you’ve been ready to leave for your entire life, the actual leaving feels less like trauma and more like relief.

Everything else worked out—the job, the friends, the fiancé.

But her son is still there, and that’s the grief she carries.

We understand the people who stay. We know how to name that choice. It’s responsible. It’s noble. It makes sense.

But Roamer 6 made me wonder about the opposite kind of pull — the kind that doesn’t disappear just because responsibility is present.

What do we do with the people who feel something so strong toward another place that it outweighs everything tying them where they are?

What do we call a woman who leaves, not because she doesn’t love her child, but because something in her knows she will disappear if she doesn’t go?

Is that selfish? Is it brave? Is it something we don’t yet have language for?

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Six interviews in, and some people like Roamer 6, describe the move as destiny and the universe conspiring to help them.

But even in the easiest stories, there’s loss. Even when everything falls into place, something gets left behind.

For Roamer 6, it’s her son.

For Roamer 1, it was her identity as a New York realtor.

For Roamer 3, it was the feeling of belonging she still doesn’t fully have in France.

For Roamer 4, it was an entire American life he had to kill before he could build a Mexican one.

There’s always a cost, even when the universe is helping.

Next week: Roamer 7.