Last november I made the decision to leave my nice job to move to Lisbon Portugal. I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to live there as I would move back and fourth between Portugal and America. My heart was telling me to just go back to America but I spent over a year working on getting this visa. So I chose the difficult path and wow has it been a journey.
I decided to leave my great position at Fetch, a mobile shopping rewards app, where I had been promoted to Senior Designer earlier that year. I truly enjoyed working with everyone there and was involved in the AAPI (Asian, American, Pacific Islander) employee resource group, assisting with event design and planning virtual company events.
I can honestly say this is an excellent workplace; it's very fast-paced, and you must be prepared for continuous changes and growth. As someone who has done a lot of solo traveling, this excites me but deep down I felt like I was meant to do something different.
I blocked these feelings out for as long as I could and felt proud of my job and even fullfiled but the feeling wouldn't go away, it would haunt me day and night until I had no choice but to leave.
Initially, I felt quite happy, almost like a badass, feeling strong enough to leave this job and shape my own life. I was also preparing for my second aerial silks performance, which was consuming a lot of my time. It was a seven-and-a-half-minute routine that I was training for relentlessly. I planned to incorporate many new, very dangerous moves to prove to myself that I could accomplish it.
After the performance ended, I finally had to confront my emotions. I was also falling in love and had just moved in with my partner, leading to numerous changes. I think my body couldn't cope with it all. I began feeling depressed, lonely, suicidal, and unworthy of being in a relationship or even of living. My sense of self was tied to my career for about 10 years, and I took pride in having a well-paying remote job and traveling solo to various places across Europe, America, and Asia.
So I did the only thing that came to mind: I decided to spend an entire month at home in Oahu, Hawaii. I wanted to reconnect with myself, be surrounded by long-time friends and family, and enjoy solitude in nature. I must say, it was indeed the right choice. I'll share more about this in another post, as I experienced many astonishing revelations. For now, I want to emphasize that it was worth it. I believe that taking the scary step is always the better option. Staying at my comfortable job would have been safe, but it would have left me constantly wondering "what if," and that's something I never want to do. Anyways I'll leave it at that.
I would rather have tried that never tried at all
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