#starting over

Fuck those assholes who created the tuition fees and made university only for the rich... fuck them seriously.

Things That Don’t Belong in My Last Chapter

I’m feeling a strange mix of emotions tonight.

I thought about waiting for them to pass. Instead, I’m writing through them.

Today, more books were packed for their trip to the public library. Along with them went almost-new notebooks, magazines, compilations I once carefully created about religion and history, and countless other things I apparently believed I needed to keep.

Another area of my home is empty now.

Two bins. A three-drawer chest. My old jewelry-making craft chest.

Empty.

And then there were the pages.

More than a thousand of them.

Poems. Letters. Essays. Thoughts. Things written in desperation, hope, anger, loneliness and love—or what I believed was love at the time.

I shredded them.

All of them.

Watching those pages disappear, I remembered how much work it had taken to preserve them in the first place.

Years ago, I went through the trouble of getting all that writing off an old iPhone and printing it. It took months to gather everything because I had convinced myself there was a book inside those pages.

Maybe there was.

I imagined salvaging all that pain and turning it into something meaningful. Poetry, prose, essays, fragments of a life. I even packed two large boxes and sent them all the way to California to someone who repeatedly promised to help me choose the pieces worth keeping.

That never happened.

Today, standing beside bags filled with shredded paper, I wondered for a moment if my dream of having a book in the world had died.

Or worse:

Had I just killed it myself?

Then I realized something.

Maybe the book was never supposed to be an archive of everything that hurt me.

Before the paper came the digital purge.

Forty thousand entries disappeared from my phone.

Seven years of writing into the void.

Then came the printed pages.

And now they are gone too.

I have mixed emotions about that.

But not one drop of regret.

Because those pages belonged to a chapter I had been refusing to close for more than twelve years.

For five of those years, I believed in an illusion.

Then came seven years of absence.

And eventually, unexpectedly, he came back.

For one brief moment, I thought perhaps life was returning something to me.

Maybe people really do change.

Maybe time had accomplished what pain couldn’t.

Maybe this was why the story had never felt completely finished.

But sometimes life doesn’t return someone because you’re supposed to begin again.

Sometimes it brings them back so you can finally understand why you had to leave.

He hadn’t changed.

If anything, he had become worse.

And this time I understood the message.

Loud and clear.

I think hope is one of the reasons we have such difficulty letting people go.

We tell ourselves we’re remembering.

We tell ourselves we’re sentimental.

We tell ourselves those photographs, letters, messages and little objects are simply pieces of our history.

Sometimes they are.

But sometimes we’re keeping them because somewhere, buried beneath everything we claim to have accepted, there is still a tiny possibility we’re unwilling to bury.

Maybe.

Maybe they’ll change.

Maybe they’ll understand.

Maybe they’ll come back.

Maybe one day everything that happened will finally make sense.

Hope can keep us alive.

But hope can also keep a door open long after we should have closed it.

It has been almost four years since I stopped caring about that relationship. And yet I still had the photographs. I still had those thousand pages written during and after those years. Until recently, I still had tens of thousands of messages.

Why?

Perhaps because throwing away the evidence felt dangerously close to saying none of it mattered.

But that’s not true.

Something doesn’t have to remain in your possession to have been part of your life.

And destroying the evidence doesn’t destroy the person you were when you lived it.

She existed.

She hoped.

She waited.

She believed.

She hurt.

She survived.

I don’t need a thousand pages in a drawer to prove it.

For years, I used to tell myself that whatever else happened, at least I knew what love was.

I had lived it.

I had felt it.

Now I’m not so sure.

I’d rather believe love is something different.

Something magical, perhaps.

Something that takes your breath away without suffocating you.

Something that doesn’t require you to abandon pieces of yourself just to keep it alive.

Maybe one day I’ll know.

Maybe I won’t.

But I no longer need to rename pain as love simply because I invested years of my life in it.

There is a strange accounting that happens as we get older.

We begin looking around at everything we’ve accumulated—not only possessions, but identities, relationships, disappointments, obligations, old versions of ourselves—and asking a question we rarely asked when we were younger:

Do I really want to carry this any farther?

Lately, I’ve been asking that question about almost everything.

The books are going.

The clothes are going.

The old car is gone.

The photographs are disappearing.

Drawers are empty.

Shelves are becoming lighter.

Thousands upon thousands of words have vanished with the touch of a button or the teeth of a shredder.

From the outside, perhaps it looks like I’m simply getting rid of things.

I’m not.

I’m deciding what belongs in the life I still have left.

There comes a point when we have to stop treating our lives as though the important chapters are all behind us.

They aren’t.

Some chapters were beautiful.

Some were devastating.

Some lasted far longer than they deserved to.

Some people were only supposed to occupy ten pages, and somehow we gave them a hundred.

But the existence of those chapters does not mean we have to spend the rest of the book rereading them.

A life has to continue too.

And mine is continuing.

That may be what all this empty space is really about.

Not death.

Not erasure.

Not pretending the past didn’t happen.

Room.

Room for places I haven’t seen.

Room for words I haven’t written.

Room for people I haven’t met.

Room for mornings I haven’t awakened to yet.

Room for whatever version of me is still waiting somewhere ahead.

I don’t know exactly what my last chapter will contain.

I only know what I don’t want to drag into it.

I cannot delete the past from my brain.

I cannot recover the years I gave away.

And I cannot rewrite chapters that have already been lived.

But I can turn the page.

I can leave behind what has finished.

And I can stop giving the past storage space in my future.

There are still blank pages ahead of me.

The World Is Still Out There

Something is happening in America.

More people are looking beyond its borders and wondering what life might look like somewhere else.

In 2025, about one in five Americans told Gallup they would move permanently to another country if they had the opportunity. Among women between 15 and 44, the number reached 40 percent—four times what it had been in 2014.

Wanting to leave, of course, is not the same as actually leaving.

Between the dream and the departure are visas, income requirements, health insurance, housing, pets, possessions, family obligations, language barriers and the simple question of whether another country will allow you to stay.

And then, for those who make it through all of that, comes something considerably harder to put on a checklist:

What happens after you arrive?

We hear plenty about the beautiful part.

The little apartment overlooking the sea. The inexpensive village house. The morning walk to the bakery. The trains. The cafés. The slower pace. The old streets and unfamiliar language. The astonishing realization that what once existed only on a computer screen is now outside your front door.

We hear less about the day the washing machine breaks and you don’t know how to explain it.

Or the afternoon when you need a doctor.

Or the government form you cannot understand.

Or the moment you realize that everybody you have ever known is thousands of miles away.

A recent Salon article explored what psychologists sometimes call migratory grief: the sadness, guilt, loneliness and loss of identity that can accompany moving to another country. People may miss family and friends, certainly, but they can also miss things they never expected to mourn—their routines, their competence, their independence, even the ability to accomplish an ordinary task without thinking about it.

At home, we know how life works.

We know how to open a bank account, find a doctor, buy what we need, make an appointment, understand a bill, complain when something goes wrong.

Move somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly you can become a beginner again.

That can be exhilarating.

It can also be exhausting.

And this is where the stories become much more interesting, because moving abroad does not affect everyone in the same way.

We Don’t All Leave the Same Life

Consider a couple.

They arrive in a foreign country where perhaps neither speaks the language well and almost everything outside their door is unfamiliar.

But they have each other.

There is someone beside them who remembers the old life. Someone who understands the joke. Someone to sit with at dinner. Someone to divide the paperwork with, figure out the train system with, or look at across the room after another bureaucratic disaster and ask:

What have we done?

That doesn’t mean moving abroad is easy for couples. Relocation can expose differences that were less visible at home. One may adapt quickly while the other becomes homesick. One may love the quiet village while the other misses restaurants, activity and friends. The dream they shared from thousands of miles away may look very different once they’re living inside it.

Still, they arrived with continuity.

A family brings even more of its old world with it.

Parents and children may enter the new country as their own small community. But a family also brings considerably more complexity.

There are schools to consider. Larger housing needs. More money. More paperwork. Perhaps employment. Children who may adapt faster than their parents—or children who desperately miss the life their parents decided to leave.

One person’s dream can become another person’s sacrifice.

Then there is the person who goes alone.

For someone whose emotional life has always depended heavily on familiar people, routines and community, that first year can be brutal.

Nobody knows your history.

Nobody expects you anywhere.

There is no automatic person to eat dinner with or laugh with when you accidentally ask for something ridiculous in the local language.

But even here, there is no universal experience.

Some people are deeply social.

Others have spent years perfectly comfortable in their own company.

For one person, solitude feels like abandonment.

For another, it feels like freedom.

The same quiet village that makes one newcomer desperately lonely may make another wonder why they waited so long to find it.

That is why there cannot be one psychological prediction for everyone who moves abroad.

We are not carrying the same needs with us.

Then There Are the Older Ones

Perhaps these are the stories I find most interesting.

The people who decide at 60, 70 or even later that they are not finished.

At 25, moving abroad can feel like the beginning of everything.

There is time to make mistakes, change countries, change careers, fall in love, run out of money, recover and begin again.

At 70, the calculation is different.

There is something else sitting quietly at the table:

time.

Not necessarily fear of dying. Something much more immediate.

The knowledge that the body will eventually have opinions about the plans.

There may come a day when carrying the suitcase becomes difficult. When climbing the station stairs isn’t easy. When health makes travel complicated. When the enormous world gradually becomes smaller.

So perhaps the older person buying the one-way ticket isn’t trying to find the perfect place to spend the next fifty years.

Perhaps they are simply saying:

I still can.

I can still board the train.

I can still get lost.

I can still learn enough of another language to order lunch.

I can still wake up somewhere I’ve never been.

I can still be surprised.

Before my world inevitably becomes smaller, I want to make it bigger.

There is something extraordinarily hopeful about that.

But Another Country Will Not Save You

This is where some of the fantasy has to end.

No country is perfect.

Not France. Not Portugal. Not Mexico. Not Romania. Not Albania. Not Italy. Not America.

Somewhere beautiful will eventually annoy you.

Somewhere affordable will lack something you took for granted.

Somewhere peaceful may become too quiet.

Somewhere exciting may exhaust you.

The charming old building may have terrible plumbing.

The gorgeous village may have no supermarket.

The inexpensive apartment may be nowhere near a train.

The famously relaxed culture may suddenly become infuriating when you’re waiting three months for somebody to process a document you need tomorrow.

And the country you were so desperate to leave may suddenly acquire qualities you never appreciated until they disappeared.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you made a mistake.

It means you moved to another real place.

Moving abroad isn’t choosing perfection.

It is choosing which imperfections you are willing to live with in exchange for the things you value more.

For some Americans, cost is becoming part of that calculation. Others talk about safety, healthcare, politics, work-life balance, retirement, ancestry, adventure or simply wanting a different experience of everyday life.

And fortunately, parts of the world still offer legal pathways for certain people to try: retirement or financially independent residence permits, ancestry-based citizenship or residency, digital-nomad programs, work permits, entrepreneurial routes and other long-stay visas.

Not every door is open to everyone.

That is another reality worth accepting early.

A visa that works beautifully for a retired single person may be useless to a family that needs employment. A couple may meet financial requirements that become considerably harder with children. Someone with ancestry in another country may have an opportunity unavailable to the person standing beside them.

The dream has to survive contact with mathematics.

And paperwork.

Lots of paperwork.

Some People Come Back

We don’t talk enough about them either.

Someone sells the house, packs the suitcases, says goodbye, crosses an ocean—and eventually decides:

No. This isn’t for me.

Perhaps they miss their family.

Perhaps the language barrier becomes exhausting.

Perhaps they discover they need more community than they thought.

Perhaps the bureaucracy defeats them.

Perhaps they simply realize that the country they left suited them better.

So they go home.

Why should that automatically be considered failure?

They tried another life.

They acquired information that no travel video, relocation consultant, Facebook group or glossy magazine article could have given them.

They lived the answer.

Sometimes the answer is stay.

Sometimes it is go.

And sometimes it is go back.

There is dignity in all three when the decision is made consciously.

The Dream Is Allowed to Change

Perhaps this is the part we forget when we begin imagining another life.

We become attached not only to the dream, but to its original architecture.

It must be that country.

That town.

That house.

That budget.

That visa.

That date.

That version of the future.

And when one piece becomes impossible, we begin believing the entire dream has failed.

But dreams are allowed to evolve.

Maybe the country changes.

Maybe the city becomes a village, or the village becomes a city.

Maybe permanent becomes six months.

Maybe the beautiful house becomes a small apartment.

Maybe retirement abroad becomes several long stays each year.

Maybe you go alone when you once thought you would go with someone.

Maybe you meet someone when you were certain you would remain alone.

Maybe the place you thought would become home turns out to be nothing more than the place that teaches you where home actually is.

None of that makes the original dream foolish.

It means reality participated in its creation.

Know Yourself Before You Pack

Research the visa.

Count the money.

Understand the healthcare system.

Look beyond the vacation photographs.

Find out what happens when the tourist season ends. Check the transportation. Check the grocery store. Check whether you can actually afford the life you’re imagining rather than merely the plane ticket that gets you there.

Think about loneliness.

Think about language.

Think about the day when nothing feels foreign anymore—and nothing feels like a vacation either.

And then ask the questions that no immigration website can answer for you:

What do I actually need to be content?

How much interaction do I need?

How much solitude can I tolerate?

How important is convenience?

Do I need a car?

Do I need people nearby?

How far can I realistically live from medical care?

What am I willing to give up for a lower cost of living, greater mobility, more adventure, more peace—or simply something different?

Know what you’re carrying with you. Know what you’re leaving behind. Know what you actually need. Then understand that the person beside you may need something entirely different.

There is no perfect country waiting for us.

No perfect town, perfect visa, perfect apartment or perfect version of starting over.

That’s not a reason to stop dreaming.

It’s a reason to dream intelligently.

If reality doesn’t look exactly like the picture you’ve carried in your head, adjust the picture.

Maybe the country changes. Maybe permanent becomes temporary. Maybe the house becomes a small apartment. Maybe you go alone. Maybe you come back.

Dreams don’t have to come true exactly as we imagined them to be worth pursuing.

They only have to remain ours.

And if you’ve done the research, counted the money, understood what you’re giving up and what you’re hoping to gain—and something inside you still wants to know what is on the other side—

go.

You can adjust the dream along the way.

Because perhaps the greatest mistake isn’t moving somewhere and discovering it wasn’t for you.

Perhaps it’s believing you have to know the ending before you’re allowed to begin.

not sure if anyone really cared (i had like, 10 followers) but i got my old account Tungstensupercollider hacked in a really stupid phishing scam that i should of caught. taking this as a chance to start again now that i know this site better and im not a stupid idiot.

some of my art to prove it's me and not a nasty bot or smth with my face