The Most Unexpected Year of My Life

I don’t know where to start this, if I’m being honest.

Part of me feels like I should just lay out the cold, hard facts and give you a high-level recap, but the other part of me knows I’d be doing you a huge disservice by not telling you the full story.

So, I guess that’s where we’re starting. Back at the beginning.

~

In November of 2022, I was torn between volunteering in Vietnam or volunteering in France… two very different places.

I was drawn to both for specific reasons.

I’ve wanted to visit Vietnam for a long time. Everything from the lush greenery and incredible food, to the poetic language and affordable excursions, attracts me. I have this feeling I would visit and immediately fall in love with the country.

On the other hand, the chateau I was going to volunteer at in France (and did end up volunteering at) drew me in from the moment I found it. Every picture and video I saw of the chateau captivated me.

Ultimately, my decision ended up bringing me to France. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the chateau and experience its magic in person.

~

Fast forward a few months to January 2023.

I volunteered at the chateau for a week and a half. I had planned to be there for three weeks, but I ended up cutting my stay short and coming home because I got a job working on my dream team.

At the time, I couldn’t handle juggling all my freelance gigs, my responsibilities at the chateau, and starting a new role. Something had to give, and the obvious decision was to leave the chateau behind.

But, before I headed home, I made my way to Paris, which was an hour and a half train ride from where the chateau was located in western France.

I honestly wasn’t too excited to visit Paris because I had already been there. At that time, I was regretfully operating under the notion that if I already visited, I didn’t need to go back.

In the days leading up to my trip, I racked my brain trying to pick a city I hadn’t visited yet and make plans to go there instead. Unfortunately, I had very limited time to make that decision, and the easiest solution was to take a short train ride back to Paris and spend three days checking out spots I didn’t get to back in 2018.

So, that’s what I did.

~

On the way to the train station, the woman who drove me there (who I got close to over the course of my stay at the chateau), said to me, “Who knows… maybe you’ll visit Paris again and decide you want to stay?” 😉

I thought to myself, “That’s highly unlikely. I liked Paris a lot the first time I visited, but I don’t envision feeling like I want to ‘stay’ this time around.”

~

A few hours later, I was roaming the streets of Paris by myself. Less than twenty-four hours in to being in that city and I had this overwhelming feeling of, “Holy shit. I need to live here.”

Which is a crazy thought and also one I’ve never had. I’ve visited a lot of places in my short life, and none of them have given me the feeling that Paris did.

Every time I consider where I want to live, I reject the idea.

LA? No.

Boston? No.

NYC? No.

Miami? No.

(If you can’t tell, I want to live in a city.)

Nowhere in the US has evoked that feeling of “yes, here”, but even more so, I’ve never felt that in any of the cities I’ve been to in other parts of the world, either.

So, it's kind of inevitable that I thought, “Me? Living in Paris? How did I come to this conclusion? Is it solely based off a few hours of walking around? That’s it? Doesn’t add up.”

Except, that’s exactly how it started adding up.

Some small, little voice encouraging me to explore a “crazy” thought.

A tiny curiosity egging me to imagine the far-fetched “what ifs?”

I made note of that feeling. Stored it away in a place labeled, “Likely to Never Happen,” and kept my feet moving.

After all, I had just landed a job on my dream team. That was enough luck to last me a lifetime… right?

~

A few months into working my job, I kept hearing that tiny voice. I tried my best to muffle it, knowing damn well what I had going for me was worth all my time and energy.

Head down, blinders on, keep going.

That’s what we do, isn’t it? We rationalize sticking to the things that look good on paper because following a “crazy” thought is delusional in the wake of what’s “right”.

The job, the place, the person, the life—we settle into the familiar feelings of mediocrity and kill the intuitive pulse we can’t quite explain.

We should feel lucky. We should count our blessings. We should justify everything that keeps us afloat. We should, shouldn’t we?

~

In May of this year, I worked up the courage to marry my “crazy” thought of living in Europe with my reality. What does that mean? I went out on a limb and asked my team for permission to be remote from Europe. I thought, “What the heck? I might as well ask. The worst they can say is no.”

So, I wrote the lengthiest email ever, laid out all the reasonings I could think of as to why they should allow me to go remote, and then waited, and waited, and waited.

(Okay, I honestly didn’t wait that long, but when you’re eager about something, waiting any length of time is hard.)

Long story short, my request ended up getting turned down. I totally understood why it wasn’t something my team could honor, and honestly, I wasn’t upset that it didn’t pan out the way I had hoped because I knew deep down that whatever was meant to be, would be. I wholeheartedly trusted in that.

~

In June, just a month after asking to be remote from Europe, an opportunity in NYC presented itself to me.

I’ve never had an interest in living in NYC nor did I care much for the actual opportunity itself, but I’m a “potential” kinda gal. I look for what an experience could lead to and what an opportunity could entail. I don’t really see anything as black or white. I try my best to envision the shades of gray in between, and that’s what I did with this opportunity.

So, as one does, I thought to myself, “Let’s just apply. Let’s broaden my horizons. Let’s see what the universe wants for me.”

Next thing I knew, I applied for the role.

From what I could see, over 1,300 people had applied for this opportunity. For that reason alone, I wasn’t expecting anything from it. I was, more or less, trying to see if I would even get noticed.

My motto over the last few years has been: shoot your fucking shot. So I did.

A week later, I received an email.

“Thank you for taking the time to apply… Upon further review, we would love to move forward with a first round interview!”

I panicked. “Oh shit. Ohhhhh shit. What did I just do?”

Was I excited? Kind of???

It was a really cool feeling to be considered out of an applicant pool of 1,300 people, but I couldn’t help but feel so conflicted for a number of reasons.

1. I was still working on my dream team.

2. I could still hear that intuitive urge to live in Europe.

3. I thought, “Maybe this opportunity is forcing me to keep my options open and to surrender to what’s meant to be.”
   

In a nutshell, I was in the biggest dilemma of my life.

*A very privileged one, at that.*

As the story goes, I had my first interview. Two days afterward, I was notified that I got moved to the second round.

The second interview was scheduled a month after the first one, which left an exuberant amount of time for me to sit in my thoughts and think about what I would do if I were to get the role.

Let’s just say, I was ~unwell~ that month. My thoughts robbed me of sleep, of an appetite, of being present, and of mental well-being. I was cut up from the inside out considering this curveball that I’d been tossed, and even though I hadn’t gotten an offer at that point, I couldn’t help but think, “What if I did get one?”

~

This is where the story gets juicy.

At the beginning of that month-long waiting period, I listened to a podcast episode by none other than the woman I was slated to be working for. In that episode, she said something along the lines of, “Sometimes you’re just so unsure of what you should do that you need to straight up ask the universe for a sign. You need to say, ‘Universe give me a sign that I should do this’.”

I honestly forgot about the podcast as the day went on, but later that night, I had a dream I asked the universe for a sign that meant I was supposed to go to France.

For some reason, I asked for my sign to be a pink flower with a yellow center. Why? I have no idea. A pink flower with a yellow center means absolutely nothing to me.

~

As one might assume, I didn’t see a single flower in my dream. Right before I woke up, I thought, “Well, no sign is a sign.”

However, in true chaotic fashion, right before I opened my eyes, in the millisecond before I became conscious, I saw a pink flower with a yellow center.

I woke up saying, “That’s my sign.”

~

A few days later, I ventured to the little town of Plymouth, Massachusetts with a couple of friends.

When we got there, we decided to get smoothies and sit by the water to drink them.

One of my friends suggested sitting at the far end of this “park” where no one was. So, we walked up to the bench we decided to sit on and immediately, I saw it.

The exact flower from my dream.

Not only was it the exact flower from my dream, it was the only flower that bloomed on the entire row of bushes.

I wondered what that flower had to push through to be the only one to blossom.

~

When we finished our smoothies, we walked around the shops located in the center of town.

There’s a shop in Plymouth called “Sprezzatura”, the name of a blog I wrote back in December of 2020. It’s an Italian word that means, “pretty put together, but not perfect”.

I asked my friends if we could stop inside so I could ask the owner what her inspiration behind the name was.

We stepped inside the shop, and the first thing my eyes landed on were these:

Things were starting to get freaky. I started to feel this magnetic alignment. It felt like the world was doing everything it could to show what path to take.

~

After I had another mini freak out, my friends and I decided to go to a bar where a one-man bad was playing.

Amidst conversation, the one-man band started singing, and I tuned in.

A few lyrics into the song and my whole body froze.

He was singing “Mad World”.

When I was volunteering at the chateau in January, I spent an entire afternoon teaching a ten-year old little French boy the lyrics to Mad World. He had to sing the song by heart in front of his class for an assignment grade, and I agreed to help him learn the lyrics.

Needless to say, that song screams “France” to me.

I had chills up and down my spine.

~

Later that day, when I was home, I told my mom all the synchronicities that unfolded. I mentioned being dead set on my decision: I was going to France.

The universe was telling me loud and clear, and it felt like a sin to ignore that.

After my rant to my mom, I went upstairs to shower, got into my pjs, climbed into bed, and opened up Instagram for the first time all day.

The first thing I saw when I opened the app was this (you only need to read the title):

If I thought the universe was screaming at me before I saw the title of that poem, it was now renting out stadiums and using the world’s loudest speakers to get the message across.

I was high-key out of my mind spooked.

~

The next few weeks came and went. I had my second interview with the team in NYC. I was secretly wishing I'd screw it up or stack up poorly against the other candidates.

Ahhh, yes. Self-sabotaging at its finest.

But naturally, the opposite happened.

I had never had a more fluid, organic, “this feels so right” conversation. Everything felt like it just naturally fell into place.

I ended the call and thought to myself, “Oh my God. Am I going to move to NYC?”

~

Later that night, I ventured into Boston with some of my friends. I was sitting at a table in a bar when I received an email from the team.

“We would love to proceed to the next step and have you meet with [our founder].”

I knew that email was coming, yet I wasn’t expecting it so soon. It left me feeling on edge, if "on edge" is the way to put it. The entire saga was getting more real by the minute.

~

Minutes later, my phone lit up.

I got a text from a dear friend. Someone I have spitballed conversations with about living in Europe. We both have had this aching desire to move there.

The last time she and I caught up in person, I said to her, “I hope the next time we have dinner, it’s when we’re living in Europe.”

The text read:

I was sitting at a table with six of my friends and a bar full of people. I tapped my friend on the shoulder and said, “Will you come to the bathroom with me?”

I beelined it for the restroom, flung open the door, and burst into tears.

What are the odds the one person I’ve talked about moving to Europe with messages me that she’s actually doing it within minutes of me receiving notice from this team in NYC?

I was so overwhelmed. I was so anxious. I was so afraid of something I never told anyone at the time, but I’m going to tell you.

Deep down, I was terrified I was going to ignore my intuition and move to NYC. If you sat me down in a quiet room all by myself and hooked me up to a lie detector, I would have told you:

The only reason I was entertaining the idea of moving to NYC was because it offered a level of stability I didn’t see when considering Europe.

I had no plan for Europe. I had no leads. No mapped out agenda. No nothing. It was just a dream.

Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve been trying to untangle my attachment to stability. I’ve been attempting to unpack my heavy reliant on it and understand the feelings buried beneath it.

But there’s only one way to really do that, and it's to lean away from what offers stability and unleash the feelings that then bubble to the surface.

That’s been the single hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I would argue it’s what keeps an entire world of people stuck in the cyclical rut they feel numbed by.

If we weren’t so attached to what brings us stability, wouldn’t we all go after our “crazy” dreams?

~

Before my third interview I thought to myself, “My conversation with the founder will likely be the deciding factor. Whatever comes of this conversation is going to be telling of how this decision swings.”

I knew my decision was probably going to come down to a split second instinct; I was likely going to rearrange my entire life and everything in it based off of a single conversation.

Yet, that was what it had to come down to. That was the last thing standing in between me and my future.

~

Which brings me to the news I am sharing with you now… Today, August 27, 2023, I am officially reporting that the flower wasn’t accidental, Sprezzatura’s shoes weren’t a coincidence, the title of the poem I saw on Instagram was right, and this is truly a Mad World.

At the beginning of November, in just a few short months, I am officially moving to Europe, and precisely, to Paris.

~

One thing I want to add because I feel it’s absolutely necessary for you to know:

When I think about my life in review, at the end of my journey when I’m, God willing, 80+ years old, I think about two things:

1. How true to myself I was willing to be

2. How much I gave

You may be wondering, “How does moving to Paris correlate to ‘giving’?”

I can’t really explain it, but I know in the deepest core of who I am, if I want to nurture this gift of giving from a place of pure intentionality, I have to continue honoring my intuition.

~

With all of that said, please honor the seeds you plant.

Water them.

Care for them.

Look after them.

You would never know how beautiful a flower could bloom if you judged it by its seed.

P.S. Don’t worry, I may be leaving soon, but I promise, I’m not going anywhere.

P.S.S. I saw the following picture on Instagram back in 2020 when I took my very first intuitively aligned step and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing at the time, but I did know one thing:

I was planting flowers 🌸